JOELa SPRING
A PRIMER OF
LIBERTARIAN
EDUCATION
Free Life Editions
New York
L4
at
S t>7
A PRIMER OF LIBERTARIAN EDUCATION
Copyright © 1975 by Joel H. Spring
All rights reserved.
Second Printing, July, 1977
Published 1975 by Free Life Editions, Inc.,
41 Union Square, New York, N.Y. 10003.
Library of Congress Catalog Number 75-10122
ISBN 0-914156-12-8 hardcover
0-914156-13-6 paperback
\ i > /
Manufactured in the United States of America
/
A NOTE ON THE ILLUSTRATIONS
The illustration on the cover and those used inside this
book are reproduced from linoleum cuts made by children
of the Modem School at the Stelton Colony, Stelton, New
Jersey (1911-1953).
CONTENTS
Introduction
1 The Radical Critique of Schooling
2 Ownership of Self
3 The Growth of Consciousness: Marx to Freire
4 Sexual Liberation and Summerhill: Reich and
Neill
5 Freeing the Child from Childhood
8 Present Realities and Future Prospects
Notes
Bibliography
9
13
33
61
81
111
129
147
155
4
INTRODUCTION
LIBERTARIAN THEORIES of education are a product of
the belief that any successful radical change in society
partly depends upon changes in the character structure and
attitudes of the population: a new society cannot be bom
unless a new person is bom that can function within it.
Radical pedagogy is concerned with new forms of sociali-
zation that will encourage non-authoritarian and revolu-
tionary character structures. Thus, radical pedagogy
encompasses not only traditional modes of learning within
the school but also methods of child rearing and the
organization of the family.
In considering radical forms of education it should be
recognized that they have stood outside the dominant
streams of educational development, which have been
directed at reforming society rather than radically chang-
ing it. For instance, public schools attempt to eliminate
poverty by educating the children of the poor so that they
9
can function within the existing social structure. Radical
education would attempt to change the social attitudes
which support this social structure. The questions raised
by radical education are very different from those raised
by a reform-oriented education. The distinction is very
much like the one Wilhelm Reich made between radical
and reactionary psychologists: a reactionary psychologist,
when confronted with poor people who are thieves, would
ask how one could end their stealing habits; a radical
psychologist would ask why all poor people do not steal.
The first approach would emphasize changing behavior to
fit into the existing social structure while the second
would try to identify those psychological characteristics of
the social structure which keep most poor people under
control.
Public schooling and radical education are almost
contradictory notions. Public schools are supported by the
dominant social structure and in turn work to support that
structure. Public schools can reform and improve but they
do not attempt to make basic structural changes. The
rejection of the public school represents one of the
important themes in the historical development of radical
forms of education— from William Godwin in the
eighteenth century to Ivan Illich in the twentieth— and has
been premised on the idea that schools came into being as
a means of shaping the moral and social beliefs of the
population for the benefit of a dominant elite. Throughout
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this tradition of
criticism has been interwoven with practical attempts by
radical groups to create a system of education that would
free people from ideological control.
This volume focuses on the major radical educational
ideas flowing from anarchism, Marxism, and the Freudian
left. Anarchism represents one important radical tradition
which has attempted to develop techniques for making
people free of all domination. As the anarchist Max Stimer
emphasized in the nineteenth century, the primary prob-
10
lem is getting people to the point of truly owning their
minds. Another radical tradition has sought to achieve
freedom from ideological control by raising levels of
consciousness and linking thought and learning to social
change. This stream of thought has made the overcoming
of human alienation in the modem industrial world the
first step in radical change. It has its origins in Marxist
thought and is best represented in the modern world by
the work of Paulo Freire. A third tradition, that of the
Freudian left, including people like A.S. Neill and Wilhelm
Reich, has emphasized the necessity of changing character
structure. All radical educators in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, of course, have placed some emphasis
on the necessity for changing the family structure and
liberating women; for some, like Reich, the elimination of
the traditional family and the development of free sexual
relations were to be the first step in radical education.
All of these groups and ideas have formed a tradition of
radical education in the nineteenth and twentieth cen-
turies. It is a tradition which has not necessarily been held
together by common contacts, though this did occur, nor
by common institutional connections. Rather, its cohesion
derives largely from a common belief that power and
domination by social structures depend on child-rearing
practices and ideological control, that the power of the
state and economy rests on a submissive population.
Radicals within this tradition have not only a shared
critique but a shared alternative vision as well, emphasizing
women’s liberation, sexual freedom, new forms of family
organization, and the importance of autonomy.
<&
11
1
THE RADICAL
CRITIQUE OF
SCHOOLING
AN IMPORTANT ELEMENT of radical concern about
education has been the reaction to the rise of mass
schooling in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
During this period there was a steady trend toward
universal compulsory schooling in state-supported and
regulated schools. The purpose of mass schooling has been
to train the citizen and worker for the modem industrial
state. It is only natural for those who seek a radical
transformation of society to have adopted a highly critical
posture toward systems of schooling which are organized
to maintain that society.
The major themes of radical criticism have centered
around the political, social, and economic power of the
school. One concern has been that public schooling under
the control of a national government inevitably leads to
attempts by the educational system to produce citizens
who will be blindly obedient to the dictates of that
13
I
government, citizens who will uphold the authority of
government even when it runs counter to personal interest
and reason and who will adopt a nationalistic posture of
“my country, right or wrong.” Another theme of radical
criticism has been that systems of schooling have been
used to produce workers who are trained by the process of
schooling to accept work which is monotonous, boring and
without personal satisfaction. These workers accept the
authority of the industrial system and do not seek any
fundamental changes in that system. Still another concern
has been the myth of social mobility through education
that has accompanied the development of mass schooling.
This myth has led to the acceptance of educational
credentials as a just measure of social worth and as a basis
for social rewards, and yet these credentials have been
distributed according to existing social class divisions.
Rather than increasing mobility, education has added more
cement to the divisions between social classes. 1
These themes are illustrated by the work of three major
critics of education: William Godwin, Francisco Ferrer,
and Ivan Illich. Godwin was one of the first critics of
education to argue against the political power the state
would derive from its ability to spread its particular
ideology in the schools. Francisco Ferrer directed his
concern toward mass public schooling and its role in
producing well-trained and well-controlled workers for the
new industrial economies of the nineteenth century. Ivan
Illich represents one of the most recent critics of the
relationship between schooling and the social system. All
of these themes will take on added meaning in later
chapters because in one sense radical theories of education
have been attempts to produce the opposite of the very
things these critics are attacking. Radicals have searched
for an educational system and a process of child rearing
that will create a non-authoritarian person who will not
obediently accept the dicatates of the political and social
system and who will demand greater personal control and
choice.
14
DURING THE LATE eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries Western societies were feeling the tension of the
shift from monarchical to republican forms of government.
During this period the close relationship between the
political process and mass public schooling was developed.
It was at this time that William Godwin wrote his
trenchant critique of mass schooling. The French and
American revolutions symbolized the eighteenth-century
faith in individual reason and its ability to guide govern-
ment. But there were certain inherent contradictions in
these political changes. Faith in individual reason could
lead to an argument for no government at all rather than a
republican form of government. For William Godwin, born
in 1756, the reduction in the power of monarchies seemed
to be followed by the increased power of a new ruling
elite. To change the form of government meant very little
as long as any government existed which could be used in
the interests of a controlling group. For Godwin faith in
the power of human reason implied a society where each
person could be sovereign rather than a republican society
with periodic changes in the ruling class.
Godwin was bom into a family of non-conformist
ministers in England. He was trained for the church, but
rejected the ministry and in 1783 attempted to open a
school. When his school did not succeed, he tried his hand
at writing. In 1793 he published an Enquiry Concerning
Political Justice which is considered the first modem
anarchist attack on the concept of the state. Four years
later he published the first modern libertarian text on
education, the Enquirer. In 1796 he married Mary Woll-
stonecraft whose book The Vindication of the Rights of
Women is still a classic treatise on women’s liberation and
the method by which education is used to enslave women
to men. 2
Godwin’s ideas must be understood within the frame-
work of the Enlightenment’s faith in progress as a product
of the unfolding of human reason. He feared that the two
15
most striking phenomena of his time— the rise of the
modern state and the development of national systems of
education to produce citizens for that state— would have \
the effect of dogmatically controlling and stifling human
reason. In the pamphlet he issued at the opening of his
school in 1783, he argued that the two main objects of
human power were government and education. The most
powerful of the two was education because “government
must always depend upon the opinion of the governed. Let
the most oppressed people under heaven once change their
mode of thinking, and they are free.” 3 Any mode of I
government gains its legitimacy from the recognition and
acceptance of people. Control of public opinion through j
education means continued support. Despotism and injus-
tice can therefore continue to exist in any society in which j
the full development of human reason has been denied
within the walls of the schoolhouse. I
The power of national education was clearly defined in
Godwin’s study of government, Enquiry Concerning Polit- ;
ical Justice. He warned that “before we put so powerful a
machine under the direction of so ambiguous an agent, it
behooves us to consider well what it is that we do. \
Government will not fail to employ it, to strengthen its
hands, and perpetuate its institutions.” Godwin believed j
that the content of national education would be shaped to
conform to the dictates of political power. He argued that
“the data upon which their conduct as statesmen is
vindicated, will be the data upon which their instructions
are founded.” 4 The concern about national education was
a reflection of his own suspicions about the nature of
government. First, Godwin felt that political institutions
favored the usurpation of power by the rich and tended to \
aggravate the differences between the rich and the poor.
Legislation protected the property of the rich by unfair
laws and systems of taxation. Law was administered by the j
government to the advantage of those with economic
power, and government enhanced the power of wealth by \
16
translating it into social and political power. Second,
Godwin believed that the growth of large centralized states
would result in the promotion of values, such as a quest
for national glory, patriotism, and international economic
and cultural competition, which would be of little benefit
to the individual:
The desire to gain a more extensive territory, to
conquer or hold in awe our neighbouring states, to
surpass them in arts or arms, is a desire founded in
prejudice and error. . . . Security and peace are more
to be desired than a name at which nations tremble. 5
National education would be used to support chauvinistic
patriotism and the political and economic power of the
state.
Godwin had other objections to national education. He
wrote,
It is not true that our youth ought to be instructed to
venerate the constitution, however excellent; they
should be led to venerate truth; and the constitution
only so far as it corresponds with their uninfluenced
deductions of truth. 6
Godwin was convinced that a just society could only be
the result of all people freely exercising their reason. Since
people were constantly improving their reasoning powers
and their understanding of nature, their understanding of
the natural laws of conduct was constantly changing.
Constitutions and other political institutions which tended
to make laws permanent could only hinder the unfolding
of people’s understanding of how life should be regulated.
It was for this reason that dodwin objected to a
national education which taught the laws of the land. Most
people, he argued, could understand that certain crimes
were injurious to the public. Those laws which stood
outside the realm of reason and had to be taught rather
17
than understood were usually laws which gave advantages
to some particular group in society. Godwin wrote, as an
example, It has been alleged, that ‘mere reason may teach
me not to strike my neighbour; but will never forbid my
sending a sack of wool from England, or printing the
French constitution in Spain.’ ” He maintained that “all
crimes, that can be supposed to be the fit objects of
judicial administration, are capable of being discerned
without the teaching of law.” He admitted that “my own
understanding would never have told me that the exporta-
tion of wool was a crime,” but, he added, “neither do I
believe it is a crime, now that a law has been made
affirming it to be such .” 7 In this statement Godwin was
expressing his own revolutionary conviction that people
should not obey laws which did not conform to individual
reason.
Godwin warned,
Had the scheme of a national education been adopted
when despotism was most triumphant, it is not to be
believed that it could have for ever stifled the voice of
truth. But it would have been the most formidable
and profound contrivance for that purpose, that
imagination can suggest.
Even in countries where liberty tended to prevail, he
argued, people should be wary of national education
because of its tendency to perpetuate error. In one of the
most striking expressions of the case against modem
schooling, Godwin declared: “Destroy us if you please; but
do not endeavor, by a national education, to destroy in
our understandings the discernment of justice and in-
justice .” 8
Godwin, however, was unique in raising such strong
objections during a time when national education was
considered one of the most advanced social causes. Even
Mary Wollstonecraft favored a national education as a
means of eliminating the social advantages of men over
18
women. Godwin’s critique was borne out by the facts:
most government plans for education were directed at
maintaining political and social order by instilling partic-
ular conceptions of law and morality; most of them did
place emphasis on building national spirit and patriotism
and were viewed as the bulwark of government. Yet most
reformers and revolutionaries of the period supported
national education plans because of a belief that schooling
would sustain individual freedom.
Throughout Western society the modem national state
instituted citizenship training in the school. In Prussia,
Johann Fichte argued that the state should expend as
much money on education as on national defense because,
The State which introduced universally the national
education proposed by us, from the moment that a
new generation of youths had passed through it,
would need no special army at all, but would have in
them an army such as no age has yet seen . 9
Fichte believed that the school would not only be an
instrument for instilling the law of the land but would
prepare individuals to sacrifice themselves for the good of
the community.
In the United States the prophets of the common school
movement argued that a common school would create a
consensus of political and social values and effectively
reduce political and social unrest. They exhibited an
almost limitless faith that the school, regardless of its
political control, would become a great engine for freedom
and human progress. For example, Henry Barnard, one of
the great American common school reformers of the
nineteenth century, expressed awareness of the problems
caused by state control of the schools, but dismissed them
arguing that in the end education always led to freedom.
In poetic terms he expressed the faith of the
nineteenth-century schoolman in the power of learning
once it is set loose in a society. “It would be easier,” he
19
wrote in reference to the government stopping the
well-schooled individual, “to return the rain to the clouds,
from which it is falling, before it has freshened hill-top and
valley, mingled with the waters of every rising spring, and
reached the roots of every growing plant.” 1 0
The faith of the nineteenth-century schoolman was
certainly crushed in the twentieth century with the rise of
Nazi Germany. Schooling in Germany during this period
exemplified all the evils Godwin had foreseen in the
eighteenth century. Schools were used to spread a par-
ticular ideology and a brand of nationalism linked to
territorial expansion and to the glorification of the
country’s leaders. The Nazis implemented changes in the
school curriculum, with compulsory training in racial
biology and increased emphasis upon German history and
literature. Five hours a day of physical education were
required for building character and discipline and as
preparation for military training. Highly propagandized
textbook material was introduced. An order from the
Minister of Education in 1935 gave specific instructions to
begin racial instruction at the age of six years, to
emphasize the importance of race and heredity for the
future of the German people and to awaken in the
students a pride in their membership in the German race as
the bearer of Nordic values. The instructions stated,
“World history is to be portrayed as the history of
racially-determined peoples.” 1 1
While Nazi Germany might represent an extreme
example of what Godwin had warned against, his criticisms
also proved prophetic in the case of the United States— the
system of schooling that Leo Tolstoy referred to as the
“least bad.” Patriotic exercises in U. S. schools reached a
fever pitch during the 1920’s under pressure from such
groups as the American Legion and the Daughters of the
American Revolution. Radical labor unions complained
about their inability to get union information into the
schools and about' the schools’ emphasis on an economic
20
philosophy opposed to unionization. Upton Sinclair, after
touring the public schools in the 1920’s, complained that
they were not furthering the welfare of humanity but were
designed merely to keep the capitalists in power. One of
the directors of a radical education program in New Jersey
in 1925 declared that
the public school system is a powerful instrument for
the perpetuation of the present social order with all
its injustices and inequality . . . and that, quite
naturally, whatever is likely to disturb the existing
arrangement is regarded unfavorably by those in
control of the public schools.
Radicals argued that in each community, elected school
boards were controlled by a business and professional elite.
Studies throughout the century tended to support this
conclusion. 1 2
Whether in Nazi Germany or in the United States,
clearly the school by its very nature had become an
institution for political control. Since it was an institution
consciously designed to change and shape people, it was
continually being sought as a weapon by different political
factions. By the twentieth century all political groups
wanted to use the school to spread their particular
ideology and mold their ideal of the modern individual.
The problem for radicals was that they usually lacked the
power to compete for control of the schools; hence, the
schools tended to become bastions of conservatism.
BY THE END of the nineteenth century it seemed that the
schools were also beginning to function as appendages to
the new industrial economies. It was charged that the
schools produced obedient servants of both the state and
the corporation. One of the leading critics to make this
21
argument was the Spanish anarchist and educator Fran-
cisco Ferrer, who founded the Modem School in Barcelona
in 1901. Ferrer’s work gained international recognition in
1909 when he was accused by the Spanish government of
leading an insurrection in Barcelona and was executed. His
execution elicited a cry against injustice from many groups
in Europe and the United States and sparked interest in his
career and ideas. In the United States a Ferrer Society was
organized and a Modem School established in Stelton,
New Jersey as well as in other places. In Europe the
International League for the Rational Education of
Children, which had been founded by Ferrer, was reorgan-
ized after his death with Anatole France as its Honorary
President. The International League attempted to continue
the publication of Ferrer’s review, L'Ecole Renovee, and
distributed information and manuals on the Modem
School. In the United States the Ferrer Society published a
journal called The Modern School which became a vehicle
for radical criticism of the schools.
“They know, better than anyone else,” Ferrer wrote in
reference to government support of schooling, “that their
power is based almost entirely on the school.” 13 In the
past, governments had controlled the masses by keeping
them in a state of ignorance. With the rise of industrialism
in the nineteenth century, governments found themselves
involved in an international economic competition which
required trained industrial workers. Schools triumphed in
the nineteenth century not because of a general desire to
reform society but because of economic requirements.
Ferrer wrote that governments wanted schools “not
because they hope for the renovation of society through
education, but because they need individuals, workmen,
perfected instruments of labor to make their industrial
enterprises and the capital employed in them profit-
able.” 14 Ferrer recognized that the hierarchical stmcture
of capitalism required certain types of character traits in
workers. They had to be trained to accept the boredom
22
and monotony of factory work and to conform obediently
to the organization of the factory. Workers needed to be
punctual, obedient, passive, and willing to accept their
work and position.
In Ferrer’s mind the schools had accomplished exactly
the things Godwin had warned of in the previous century.
In becoming the focal points for maintaining existing
institutions, schools came to depend on a system and
method which conditioned the student for obedience and
docility. This, of course, was a charge leveled at the
schools by a variety of critics; from Ferrer’s point of view,
however, it was an inevitable result of a school controlled
by the state. “Children must be accustomed,” Ferrer
wrote, “to obey, to believe, to think, according to the
social dogmas which govern us. Hence, education cannot
be other than such as it is to-day.” 1 5 For Ferrer one of the
central problems was to break government’s power over
education. Reform movements that tried to work within
the system could accomplish nothing toward the goal of
human emancipation. Those who organized the national
schools, Ferrer claimed, “have never wanted the uplift of
the individual, but his enslavement; and it is perfectly
useless to hope for anything from the school of to-day.” 1 6
For Ferrer it was inconceivable that a government
would create a system of education which would lead to
any radical changes in society. It was therefore unrealistic
to believe that national schooling would be a means of
significantly changing the conditions of the lower classes.
Since it was the existing social structure which produced
the poor, education could eliminate poverty only by
freeing people to change the social structure in a radical
direction. Writing in a bulletin of the Modem School about
the mixing of rich and poor in the schools of Belgium,
Ferrer stressed that “the instruction that is given in [the
schools] is based on the supposed eternal necessity for a
division of rich and poor, and on the principle that social
harmony consists in the fulfilment of the laws. 1 What
23
the poor were taught, according to Ferrer, was to accept
the existing social structure and to believe that economic
improvement depended on individual effort within the
existing structure.
Ferrer’s criticisms were directed at the very existence of
national systems of schooling. Like Godwin, he saw the
inevitable use of the school as a source of political control.
Schools were becoming a great battleground in which each
faction attempted to use the schools for its own ends. “All
sides know the importance of the game,” he wrote, “and
recoil at no sacrifice to secure a victory. Everyone’s cry is
‘for and by the School.’ ” 1 8 The two dominant groups in
this battle were government and industry. The government
wanted the schools to produce loyal citizens, and industry
wanted obedient and trained workers. From Ferrer’s point
of view these demands were not in conflict. Like Godwin,
he believed that the state existed to protect the interests of
the rich and that the needs of industry found expression
through the state. The differences between the criticisms
of Godwin and Ferrer reflect the social differences
between the late eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries.
The late eighteenth century witnessed the triumph of the
nation state, with its demand for loyal citizens. The late
nineteenth century witnessed the triumph of the industrial
revolution, with its demand not only for trained workers
but also for workers who would perform hours of tedious
drudgery on the assembly line of the factory. Within this
context the goals of schooling were to be accomplished
both through the content of the material taught in the
school and the method of presentation.
THE QUESTION OF METHOD became a central concern
for these educators. They held that there was a direct link
between methods of teaching and school organization, and
the type of character molded by the school. Godwin, for
24
instance, argued that it was the method of discipline and
the techniques of teaching that undermined reason and
eroded human freedom. He made a direct link between the
form of motivation used by the teacher and the power of
the government. A teacher used extrinsic motivation,
presenting material to the student “despotically, by
allurements or menaces, by showing that the pursuit of it
will be attended with . . . approbation, and that the neglect
of it will be regarded with displeasure.” Extrinsic motiva-
tion was defined as that which is connected to a thing by
accident or at the pleasure of some other individual such as
grades, or threats of punishment. Government, Godwin
believed, also depended on extrinsic motives to assure that
people acted in a certain manner. Laws and police were the
despotic means by which government assured that people
would act in the interests of the state. An education based
on the despotic methods of extrinsic motives prepared the
individual for a government of despotic laws. 1 9
In the United States the great debate at the beginning of
the twentieth century centered around the type of social
and economic characteristics produced within the class-
room environment. Liberal educators rejected competition
and individual work as promoting laissez-faire individual-
ism. They sought a greater emphasis on group activity and
group projects. This method of tdadhing, j it ( , argued,
would mold the type of character required by the pew
corporate state. Radicals in the ynited States rejected' not
only the traditional classroom blit also the liberal quest.
Both sought to mold the student in accordance with the
needs and authority of state and industry. One of the
directors of the Modem School in New Jersey wrote in the
1920’s,
From the moment the child enters the public school
he is trained to submit to authority, to do the will of
others as a matter of course, with the result that
habits of mind are formed which in adult life are all
to the advantage of the ruling class. 2 0
25
F
The question of the type of methods used in the
classroom includes the degree and nature of authority. The
schools of the twentieth century have developed a form of
anonymous authority which prepares students for
manipulation by a bureaucratic and propagandists society.
The traditional classroom exemplified overt authority
where the teacher directly confronted the students with
his or her power and students were at all times aware of
the source of power. The redeeming factor in this situation
was that if students wished to rebel and claim their
freedom, they could identify the source of power and
react to it. In the twentieth century anonymous forms of
authority were introduced into the classroom through the
use of more sophisticated psychological techniques for
control. These forms of control have made the realization
of manipulation and identification of the source of control
extremely difficult.
The issue of the methods of the modem classroom and
its relationship to control and authority is elucidated in
the writings of Ivan Illich. Illich accepts the radical
argument thdt the techniques used in the classroom in
both . the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were related
to shaping a character tjiat could be manipulated by the
existing institutions of authority. The changes in classroom
techniques |We^q dirfedtly 'related to changes within these
institutions. Illich argues that a modem consumer-oriented
society requires a type of character which is dependent on
the Advice of experts for every action. Modern society
depends on the consumption of expertly planned pack-
ages. The school prepares the individual for this society by
assuming responsibility for “the whole child.” By attempt-
ing to teach automobile driving, sex education, dressing,
adjustment to personality problems, and a host of related
topics, the school also teaches that there is an expert and
correct way of doing all of these things and that one
should depend on the expertise of others. Students in the
school ask for freedom and what they receive is the lesson
26
that freedom is only conferred by authorities and must be
used “expertly.” This dependency creates a form of
alienation which destroys people’s ability to act. Activity
no longer belongs to the individual but to the expert and
the institution . 2 1
RADICAL CRITICS HAVE also been concerned about the
type of character that is developed within the educational
process; this concern goes beyond the classroom and into
the whole area of child rearing and the nature of the
modem family. For instance, psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich
believed that the basic problem in character formation was
the structure of the middle-class family. In discussing the
rise of fascism in Germany, he linked the authoritarian
personality with the process of child rearing within the
middle-class German family. Significant social change, he
argued, could only take place by changing the family. This
theme was echoed throughout the nineteenth and twen-
tieth centuries and, as we shall see later, was an important
ingredient in many radical education plans . 2 2
Criticism was also leveled at the school insofar as it
tended to reinforce and strengthen the social class struc-
ture of a society. This problem was debated in almost all
educational circles in the nineteenth and twentieth cen-
turies. In the United States educators continually wrestled
with the problem of organizing an educational system that
decreased the separation between social classes. American
educators in the nineteenth century were always quick to
criticize European systems for providing different schools
for different social classes. Horace Mann, the great
common school reformer of the nineteenth century, hoped
to overcome this problem by establishing a common
school that would be attended by children of all classes.
Mann thought that with the rich and the poor rubbing
27
shoulders in the common schoolhouse, class distinctions
would melt away. The problem with the common school
approach was that not all children entered the school with
the same cultural background and intellectual tools, nor
did they intend to use their education for the same
purposes. In other words, the common school provided the
student with too common an education. By the end of the
nineteenth century American educators were trying to
overcome this problem by “individualizing instruction”
and “meeting individual needs.”
The attempt by American educators to solve the
problem of social class highlights one criticism made by
Ivan Illich, namely, that the public school as a central
institution of socialization tends to reinforce the social
organization of the surrounding society. In this particular
case the school tends to increase social stratification. The
attempt to meet “individual needs” in American educa-
tion-through ability grouping, vocational tracking, and
special programs — raised all the contradictions and prob-
lems inherent in the school. Ability and vocational
grouping were based on intelligence tests, interest and
achievement tests, and counseling, with the result that by
the middle of the twentieth century there was great
concern that American education was discriminating on
the basis of social class and race. During the 1940’s
sociologists studying a small American town found that
there was a direct correlation between social classes and
vocational tracks in the high school. Children of the town’s
upper class dominated the ranks of the college preparatory
program and children of the lowest class in town filled the
vocational track. 2 3 This pattern appeared throughout the
United States. And when children were separated
according to ability as defined by standardized tests they
ended up being grouped according to social class and race.
In America children were schooled into their social places
almost as if there were separate schools for each social
class.
28
For Ivan Illich this process of social stratification is
inherent in schooling and is one of its most destructive
features. During the 1960’s, while Chancellor of the
Catholic University of Puerto Rico, he realized that despite
the amount of money the underdeveloped countries of
Latin America were spending on education, the poor were
not reaping the full benefits of these expenditures. For
people to get a full return on the educational dollar they
had to go through the whole process of schooling, from
the early grades through the universities.
The poor are led to believe that schools will provide
them with the opportunity for social advancement, and
that advancement within the process of schooling is the
result of personal merit. The poor are willing to support
schooling on the basis of this faith. But since the rich will
always have more years of schooling than the poor,
schooling becomes just a new way of measuring established
social distances. Because the poor themselves believe in the
rightness of the school standard, the school becomes an
even more powerful means of social division. The poor are
taught to believe that they are poor because they did not
make it through school. The poor are told that they were
given the opportunity for advancement, and they believe
it. Social position is translated through schooling into
achievement and underachievement. Within the school the
social and economic disadvantages of the poor are termed
underachievement. Without the school there would be no
dropouts.
Like Francisco Ferrer, Illich views the school as a
prostitute of power. The ultimate power, he believes, is the
school’s effect on one’s self-concept; that is, education
teaches individuals about their own personal ability and
character traits. People learn to think of themselves as
stupid or bright, as being worthy or as being failures.
Assuming that an adequate self-concept depends on
acceptance and on ability to function in a social context,
the psychological power of the school is obvious. The
29
school dropout is told essentially that the school— that
most helpful and democratic of institutions— has given him
or her all opportunities and she or he has failed. The
dropout cannot help but accept this failure and conclude
that there is little he or she can now do to get ahead.
Rejection by the school leads to submission, apathy, and
in the end to complete helplessness and social stagnation.
The authority of one social class over another is also
strengthened in this process. The school teaches that those
with more schooling are better people. Illich argues that
the poor learn in school that they should submit to the
leadership of those with more schooling, namely the upper
classes.
Ivan Illich describes the school as the new church.
Society’s support of schooling as a religious faith reflects
one of the central concerns of radical critics. The school
derives its great power from the fact that it has become the
central child-rearing institution in modem industrial so-
cieties. Early childhood education and day-care centers are
slowly increasing the power of this institution, while the
role of other institutions in the process of child rearing,
such as the family and church, has slowly been eroded.
IN SUMMARY, the very existence of the school allows for
its use by a particular political and economic ideology. The
content of what is taught depends on who controls
society. But the power of the school extends beyond its
propagandists role. The socialization process of the school
shapes a particular type of character which meets the
needs of the dominant power within the society. For
critics like Godwin and Ferrer, the socialization process of
the school molds citizens who will submit to the authority
of the state and function as loyal workers in the new
industrial society. And the socialization process schools
30
people into an acceptance of their social position and
makes them dependent upon an irrationally organized
consumer society.
0
31
I!'
2
OWNERSHIP
OF SELF
OWNERSHIP OF SELF is an important concept in radical
theories of education because it extends the idea of
freedom, taking it beyond its usual meaning of political
liberty and equality before the law, and emphasizing
control over one’s beliefs and actions. Political liberty has
little meaning if an individual’s actions are guided by an
internalized authority from which there is no escape. This
internalized authority can be the result of the moral
imposition of a religion, an education or a child-rearing
process. Certainly one of the goals of most educational
systems has been the internalization of beliefs and the
development of a conscience that will give unquestioned
support to the existing social structure. The search for
ownership of self has been directed toward finding an
educational method or institutional arrangement that
would allow for freedom from internalized authority and
33
ideological domination. This has led to experiments with
non-authoritarian methods of education.
The concept of ownership of self emerged from the
rationalistic background of the eighteenth-century Enlight-
enment. The Enlightenment brought a revolt against
moralistic preachings and religious dogma which hampered
the free use of reason. In the nineteenth century argu-
ments were directed at both the state and the church and
included a concern with ideology and the alienation of
thought from action. This concern revolved around the
Marxist argument that the dominant ideology of a society
is the ideology of the dominant elite. Ideology is not a
product of the actions of the vast majority of a society,
but of the needs and desires of one particular social class.
Since ideology gives shape and meaning to knowledge, this
results in a separation of thought and action. Knowledge
becomes something which uses people rather than being
used by them. For example, Francisco Ferrer argued in the
late nineteenth century that a knowledge of arithmetic
could either become a tool for individual use or a tool of
enslavement to the industrial system. If arithmetic were
taught in terms of the ideology of capitalism— dealing with
such things as problems of interest rates, business compu-
tations, and other techniques for functioning within the
capitalist system— knowledge became a tool for enslave-
ment. On the other hand, if arithmetic problems involving
the development of new economic systems were presented,
it became a tool of freedom and action . 1
Since internalized forms of authority constitute a strong
barrier to ownership of self, they have been a major
concern of radical critics from Rousseau, to Stimer, to the
present day. Traditionally, Christianity referred to inter-
nalized authority as “conscience” and viewed it as the
presence of God’s guidance and law within each person. In
the late nineteenth century, church, school, family, and
community customs were all viewed as important sources
34
for the internalization of beliefs which help maintain social
order.
ONE OF THE EARLIEST educational plans to deal with
freeing the individual from the domination of a system of
internalized prescribed beliefs was Jean Jacques Rousseau’s
Emile, written in the eighteenth century . 2 This work is
certainly not as radical as that of the nineteenth-century
anarchists but it did foreshadow many of their ideas and is
a valuable aid to understanding the later arguments of men
like the German anarchist Max Stimer. Rousseau’s educa-
tional plan was based on the psychological argument that
an individual was incapable of reasoning about moral and
social problems until the age of adolescence. Any teaching
of moral and social ideas before this age resulted in
acceptance on the basis of authority rather than reason.
Rousseau recommended isolating the child from these
problems and building the child’s early education around a
future use of reason. The problem of isolation became an
important issue among libertarian educators in the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries. Was it really feasible to
isolate the child from any dogmatic teaching? And what
do you teach if you are isolating the child from all dogma?
As we shall see, this became an important problem for
anarchist educators like Francisco Ferrer.
According to Rousseau, the individual during this early
period of development was incapable of reasoning about
morality or social relations. Words like “duty,” “obey,”
“command,” and “obligation” should be banished from
the vocabulary during this stage of life. An adult should
not confront a child with any claim of authority or duty,
but with the simple reality that the adult is stronger and
older.
For Rousseau the important thing was to avoid any
35
moralistic situations before the age when the child could
handle them with his or her own powers of reasoning. This
was an important aspect of what Rousseau called “negative
education.’’ In this case it meant no moral instruction. If
moral instruction were given at an early age, it would
dominate action rather than be utilized by the individual.
The second part of negative education was the avoidance
of verbal learning. This meant education through exper-
ience and not through verbal instruction or reading.
Rousseau felt that books were one of the great plagues of
childhood. He did not mean that the child should not be
taught how to read, but rather that learning to read should
be attached to experience and necessity. For example,
Emile in Rousseau’s book would receive invitations to
dinners and parties and couldn’t find anyone to read them
to him. From these experiences Emile would take it upon
himself to learn how to read because of self-interest and
necessity. Rousseau’s method of teaching reading avoided
moral instruction— it wasn’t based on a sense of duty or
belief in some abstract good. Learning and knowledge were
tools for the individual to use, not tools to use the
individual. As we shall see in the next chapter, this is a
major emphasis in the pedagogical methods of Paulo
Freire.
The same idea guided the education of Emile just before
the stage of adolescence. Rousseau argued that following
the law of necessity came the principle of utility.
Embodied in this principle was the sacred question, “What
is the good of that?” During this stage Emile was
introduced to the usefulness of social relationships while
avoiding their moral aspects. By learning about the manual
arts and occupations, Emile learned about the interde-
pendence of society and the usefulness of social organi-
zation. Emile learned about the importance of social
organization by experiencing its personal usefulness and
necessity. Thus with the beginning of the age of reason
Emile would be able to make a choice not on the basis of
36
belief but after consideration of necessity and usefulness.
The acceptance of a government, for instance, would not
be a product of youthful indoctrination or the establish-
ment of a fixed set of beliefs but a choice resulting from a
process of reasoning.
At adolescence, Rousseau argued, the individual was
reborn. The development of sexual drives forced the
individual out of a narrowly defined sense of self into the
social world. The development of moral and social
reasoning was a direct outgrowth of self-love. An in-
dividual’s understanding of others was based on the ability
to identify with the feelings of others. Concerns about
good and bad with regard to others were to be a result of
the identity one established between self and others. At
this stage Emile was introduced into society and under-
went social and religious education. From this Emile
learned that if the authority of individuals and the
prejudices of society are eliminated from education, and
the individual is educated according to nature, the light of
reason becomes the guide for individual action.
At the end of Emile’s education he was asked what he
had learned. He replied that he had been taught to be free
by learning to yield to necessity, the ultimate necessity of
life being death. Rather than struggle with destiny,
freedom requires its acceptance. He also argued that
people cannot obtain freedom under the safeguard of laws.
Liberty, he claimed, was not to be found in government
but in the heart of the free person.
ONE OF THE SIGNIFICANT FAILURES of Emile was
Rousseau’s plan for making all social and moral beliefs the
product of reasoning based on necessity and usefulness. It
was the nineteenth-century anarchist Max Stimer who
developed this idea to its fullest and labeled it the
ownership of self. Stimer, whose reeil name was Johann
37
Casper Schmidt, was a poor German schoolteacher who
during the 1840’s attended meetings of the Young
Hegelians in Berlin with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. In
1842 Marx published Stimer’s important article on edu-
cation, “The False Principle of Our Education,” in the
Rheinische Zeitung. In 1844 Stirner completed his book
. The Ego and His Own which so upset Marx that he later
devoted a large section of The German Ideology to an
attack on Stirner. 3
Stirner essentially agreed with Rousseau that the
method of education should allow for individual choice of
belief. He premised this on the idea that individuals should
at all times make their knowledge and beliefs subservient
to their own needs and desires. In a sense the real test of
this was their ability to rid themselves of any particular
idea and belief. As Stirner wrote in his book, The Ego and
His Own, “The thought is my own only when I have no
misgiving about bringing it in danger of death every
moment, when I do not have to fear its loss as a loss for
me, a loss of me.” 4 The thought that one could not get rid
of, the thought which owned the individual, was what
Stirner referred to as the “wheel in the head”— the moral
imperative which told one what should be done. It was the
thought which controlled the will, the knowledge which
used the individual, rather than being used by the
individual.
For Stirner the ownership of self meant the elimination
of “wheels in the head.” This was a theme he elaborated
on in “The False Principle of Our Education.” Stirner
III made a distinction between a “freeman” and an “educated
man.” For the educated man knowledge was used to shape
character; it became a wheel in the head which allowed
him to be possessed by the church, state or humanity. For
the freeman knowledge was used to facilitate choice. “If
one awakens in men the idea of freedom,” Stirner wrote,
then the freemen will incessantly go on to free
themselves; if, on the contrary, one only educates
38
them, then they will at all times accommodate
themselves to circumstances in the most highly
educated and elegant manner and degenerate into
subservient cringing souls. 5
For the freeman knowing something was the source of
greater choice, while for the educated man knowing
something was the determiner of choice.
The major problem with modern society, Stirner be-
lieved, was that it was full of educated people instead of
free people. “Man,” Stirner warned, “your head is
haunted; you have wheels in your head! . . . An idea that
has subjected the man to itself.” The problem was how to
achieve not political liberty but ownership of self. Stirner
objected to the idea of political liberty because it only
meant the freedom of institutions and ideology. “Political
liberty,” he wrote,
meant that the polis, the State, is free; freedom of
religion that religion is free, as freedom of conscience
signifies that conscience is free; not, therefore, that I
am free from the State, from religion, from con-
science, or that I am rid of them. 6
This made the control and nature of education the central
issue for modem society.
The real source of power in a society was the institution
which owned the inner life of the individual. In the past
the church fulfilled the mission of guiding and dominating
the mind. In the world of the nineteenth century the
dominating influence was becoming the politics of the
state. Religion and politics gained power by their ability to
establish imperatives directing the actions of the indi-
vidual. Stirner wrote, “Under religion and politics man
finds himself at the standpoint of should: he should
become this and that, should be so and so. With this
postulate, this commandment, every one steps not only in
front of another but also in front of himself.” 7
39
The power of the modem state lay in its recognition of
the importance of domination of the mind. In the modem
state, laws were internalized within the individual, so that
“freedom” merely meant the freedom to obey the laws
that one had been taught to believe. It was the dream of
the nineteenth -century schoolmasters to end disobedience
through the internalization of law in the public schools.
Stirner wrote, in one of his finest passages,
Here at last the domination of the law is for the first
time complete. “Not I live, but the law lives in me.”
Thus I have really come so far to be only the vessel of
its glory. Every Prussian carries his gendarme in his
breast, says a high Prussian officer.
Placing the gendarme in the breast was the goal of the
modem state. Freedom meant freedom from direct control
of the state and freedom to act according to the laws of
the state. Stirner quoted Francois Guizot, an important
political leader in France in the 1840’s, as stating, “The
great difficulty of to-day is the guiding and dominating of
the mind. Formerly the church fulfilled this mission; now
it is not adequate to it. It is from the university that this
great service must be expected. . . .” It was for this reason,
Guizot argued, that government had the duty of support-
ing the university. Stirner pointed out that the charter
being issued for the university called for freedom of
thought and conscience. He quietly commented, “So, in
favor of freedom of thought and conscience, the minister
demands ‘the guiding and dominating of the mind.’ ” 8
If ■ Domination was not only an internalization of a
concrete ideology which had direct and immediate ref-
erence to the needs of a society. Domination also referred
to the ideal, the moral imperative that captured the loyalty
of the individual. There were two levels of wheels in the
head. The first level led people through everyday life. One
went to church and paid taxes because that was what one
was taught; that was the way one lived. On the second
40
level were ideals — ideals that drove people to sacrifice
themselves for the good of the fatherland, that made them
try to be Christ-like, ideals that led them to give up what
they were for some unrealizable goal. It was this realm of
ideals upon which the strength of the church and state
was built. Patriotism and religious fervor were the results
of people being possessed by ideals.
The ideal gains possession of people, Stirner argued,
because of a confusion between what is thinkable and
what is possible. Just because one can think that all people
can be good does not mean that it is possible for all people
to be good nor that they ought to be good. Yet it is
precisely this “sleight of mind, ’’Stirner suggested, that occurs.
“It was thinkable that men might become rational;
thinkable, that they might know Christ; thinkable, that
they might become moral . . . that they might be obedient
subjects . . .” Since it was thinkable, it was possible, “and
further, because it was possible to men . . . therefore they
ought to be so, it was their calling; and finally— one is to
take men only according to this calling, only as called men,
‘not as they are, but as they ought to be.’ ” From this
point of view, individuals in the modem world were driven
creatures who sacrificed what they were for some ideal of
what they ought to be. People did not own themselves but
were owned by what they ought to be. The church told
people they ought to be like Christ, the state that they
ought to be good citizens, and the liberal politician that
they ought to give all to the cause of humanity. Modem
individuals could never find themselves because of a world
surrounded with images of what they ought to be. “Man is
not the individual,” Stirner wrote, “but man is a thought,
an ideal, to which the individual is related not even as the
child to the man, but as a chalk point to a point thought
of . . .” Both the possibility and moral imperativeness of
an ideal gain existence because they too can be formulated
by thought. The thought of the dominant institutions
became the moral imperative of a society. In the past the
41
dominant institution was the church with its handmaiden,
the priest; in the nineteenth century it was the state and
its preacher, the schoolmaster. “Thus,” Stimer wrote, “the
thinkers rule in the world as long as the age of priests or of
schoolmasters lasts, and what they think of is possible, but
what is possible must be realized .” 9
Stimer believed that for individuals to own themselves
they must gain beliefs not through schooling but through
actions of the will. In other words, a person might find it
useful to believe in something and act according to that
belief. All ideas and actions were to be judged in terms of
their value to the person. The distinction Stimer made was
essentially the difference between learning a religious
catechism at an early age and making a choice later in life
about joining a church. On the one hand, learning to
believe in a religion at an early age put a wheel in the head
that was difficult to lose. Religion becomes, as Stimer
stated, “An idea that has subjected the man to itself.” On
the other hand, if one chose a religion through the exercise
of reason based on relevant knowledge and free of any
belief about what ought to be, that belief was owned by
that person. If one owned the thought, one could get rid
of it; it did not own the individual.
Of course in the case of religion, Stimer assumed that
nobody would want to own such a belief if given a choice.
Religion and the state depended upon the teaching of
dogma. If people truly owned themselves, Stimer assumed,
they would not find religion or the state useful and would
not choose them.
II! < Stimer also criticized the idea of equality in the modem
state. Equality within the state amounted simply to equal
treatment by the state. “As citizens of the State,” Stimer
wrote, “they are certainly all equal for the State. But it
will divide them and advance them or put them in the rear,
according to its special ends, if on no other account; and
still more must it distinguish them from one another as
good and bad citizens.” Within the framework of equality
42
M
and freedom, the modern state turned all things to its own
ends. Equality before the law did not mean the end of
injustice, for all people could be treated equally under
unjust laws . 1 0
The belief in the rightness of the state was the main
problem. If people became citizens and lived for the state,
then the state could sanctify all actions. “If the welfare of
the State is the end, war is a hallowed means; if justice is
the State’s end, homicide is a hallowed means, and is called
by its sacred name, ‘execution’; the sacred State hallows
every thing that is serviceable to it.” The state was an
instrument of power for the dominant elite in a society. If
the elite killed through the state it was justice. If a citizen
killed in retaliation, it was a crime. This situation could
exist only if people were taught to believe in the concept
of the state. Just as the church taught morality for God,
schools taught citizenship for the state.
The solution to the problem of the state was a direct
outgrowth of Stimer’s reflections on education-
knowledge would become a vehicle for self-ownership, a
tool by which people made choices about what was useful
to them. Stimer envisioned replacing the state with a
Union of Egoists— a social organization of free individuals
in which there would be no sacrifice to meaningless
abstraction; like the “welfare of human society.” Social
organizations and institutions would be based on the needs
of each individual. When their usefulness ended, so would
the institutions . 1 1
Stimer never stated in any detail how one would achieve
an education free of dogma and moral imperatives or how
an individual could be freed of the wheels in the head. This
process became a goal for libertarian educators. They often
got bogged down in circular arguments about a non-
dogmatic education itself establishing its own dogma.
Some radicals found themselves in the strange position of
taking a strong ideological stance toward social problems
but fearing to convey that belief to the child. For example,
43
the American anarchist Emma Goldman warned radical
parents at the beginning of the twentieth century that if
they imposed beliefs on their children, they would find
that the
boy or girl, over-fed on Thomas Paine, will land in the
arms of the Church, or they will vote for imperialism
only to escape the drag of economic determinism and
scientific socialism, or that they . . . cling to their
right of accumulating property, only to find relief
from the old-fashioned communism of their father. 1 2
THE DILEMMA OF ESTABLISHING an education for
self-ownership was highlighted in Francisco Ferrer’s
Modem School in Spain. When Ferrer set about organizing
his school in the 1890’s, he searched for non-dogmatic
books for its library. He found himself completely
frustrated in his search and consequently the school
opened without a single volume in its library. 1 3 The
inability to find a non-dogmatic text illustrates the danger
of libertarian education becoming a vacuum, with adults
fearing to pass on any knowledge. This extreme was never
reached in the nineteenth century because of a basic belief
in the objective facts of science and human reason. There
was an overriding faith that there existed a body of
objective natural and social laws that people could learn
i* 1 and use for their own benefit.
It was within the framework of science and rationalism
that Ferrer tried to actualize an education for self-
ownership and freedom from dogmatic control. He be-
lieved the role of the teacher to be that of planting the
germ of ideas which would grow within the range of the
individual’s reason. The germ of the ideas was to be in the
form of the exact sciences. “The work of man’s cerebral
44
energy is to create the ideal,” Ferrer wrote, “with the aid
of art and philosophy. But in order that the ideal shall not
degenerate into fables, or mystic and unsubstantial
dreams ... it is absolutely necessary to give it a secure and
unshakable foundation in the exact sciences.” 1 4
The only purpose in teaching the exact sciences was to
provide a basis for the use of reason. Education was not
designed to make a person into a good citizen, a religious
person, or even a good person. Any such goal was viewed
as dogmatic, as imposing an ideal of what ought to be. It
was for this reason that there were no rewards or
punishments in Ferrer’s Modem School. “Since we are not
educating for a specific purpose,” Ferrer wrote, “we
cannot determine the capacity or incapacity of the child.”
In other words, in an educational process with no
particular goal or end, the children could not be rewarded
or punished because there was nothing to be punished
for . 1 5
There were goals, of course. Whether these goals
defeated the idea of non-dogmatic education was a
question that provided endless debate in libertarian circles
and proved utterly unanswerable. Ferrer clearly stated,
It must be the aim of the rational schools to show the
children that there will be tyranny and slavery as long
as one man depends upon another, to study the
causes of the prevailing ignorance, to learn the origin
of all the traditional practices which give life to the
existing social system, and to direct the attention of
the pupils to these matters.
One feels confident that Ferrer would have dismissed any
criticism of this goal as nonsense. He was convinced that
there was an objective set of facts that could be learned
without subjecting the student to an ideology.
One example was Ferrer’s technique of teaching arith-
metic. This was discussed earlier in this chapter as an
illustration of either enslavement or freedom through
knowledge. Ferrer wanted arithmetic taught with examples
dealing with the just distribution of production, communi-
cation, transportation, the benefits of machinery, and
public works. “In a word,” Ferrer wrote, “the Modem
School wants a number of problems showing what
arithmetic really ought to be— the science of the social
economy (taking the work economy in its etymological
sense of ‘good distribution’).” 1 6 In this sense objective
fact or knowledge had a special meaning. It was objective
in the sense that individuals could use it for maintaining
their own individual freedom. Arithmetic placed in the
framework of the existing economic systems became a
method by which individuals were indoctrinated into those
systems. On the other hand, arithmetic presented as a tool
for creating a more just organization of the economy was
knowledge that individuals could use to free themselves.
Another example of this type of method was Emma
Goldman’s criticism of traditional methods of teaching
history. She wrote, “See how the events of the world
become like a cheap puppet show, where a few wire-pullers
are supposed to have directed the course of development
of the entire race.” History which emphasized the actions
of rulers, governments, and great men conditioned the
individual to accept a society in which most people were
expected to be passive with a few leaders directing events.
Emma Goldman believed history should emphasize the
ability of all people to act and shape the direction of
history. History presented in the traditional manner
enslaved humanity to authoritarian institutions. But when
history is portrayed with all people as active agents,
individuals learn of their power to shape the future. 1 7
The educational process in these examples loses its
dogmatism and moral direction— it presents material the
individual can use to obtain freedom. The problem with
this technique is that it skirts the issue of how the
individual can learn about a particular ideology out of a
desire to understand. How does one learn about religion
46
without becoming religious? How does one learn about
capitalism without becoming a capitalist? Should one in
fact isolate the child from all beliefs? Couldn’t one learn
more about the real meaning of an ideology by listening to
a believer argue his or her cause?
ONE WAY OUT of this particular dilemma was offered by
the Christian anarchist and Russian novelist, Leo Tolstoy,
who established a school in Russia in the 1860’s. Tolstoy
resolved the issue by replacing the concept of education
with that of culture. He argued that one had to make a
clear distinction between the concepts of culture, educa-
tion, instruction, and teaching. Culture was defined as the
total of all the social forces which shaped the character of
the individual. Education was the conscious attempt to
give people a particular type of character and habit. As
Tolstoy stated, “Education is the tendency of one man to
make another just like himself.” The difference between
education and culture was compulsion. “Education is
culture under restraint. Culture is free.” Tolstoy argued
that instruction and teaching were related to both educa-
tion and culture. Instruction was the transmission of one
person’s information to another; teaching was the instruc-
tion of physical skills. Teaching and instruction were
means of culture, Tolstoy claimed, when they were free.
They were means of education, “when the teaching is
forced upon the pupil, and when the instruction is
exclusive, that is when only those subjects are taught
which the educator regards as necessary.” 1 8
Learning, then, should be a process of culture and not
of education. The school should practice non-interference,
with students left free to learn what they wanted to learn.
Tolstoy defined a school as “the conscious activity of he
47
who gives culture upon those who receive it . . Non-
interference in the school meant “granting the person . . .
the full freedom to avail himself of the teaching which
answers his need, which he wants . . . and to avoid teaching
which he does not need and which he does not want.”
Museums and public lectures were examples of schools of
non-interference: they were consciously planned to
achieve a certain goal, but the user was free to attend or
not to attend. Established schools and universities, on the
other hand, used a system of rewards and punishments and
limited the area of studies to achieve their particular ends.
A non-compulsory school was one without a planned
program where teachers could teach what they wanted and
their offerings would be regulated by the demands of the
students. The school would not be interested in how its
teaching was used or what the effect would be on the
students. The school would be a place of culture and not
of education.
Tolstoy’s solution essentially tried to solve the Stimer-
ian problem of self-ownership by eliminating all compul-
sory institutions that were designed to turn a person into
something. This was premised on a profound belief that if
people were allowed to be self-regulating, they would
choose the best and most rewarding life. For Tolstoy, who
was a Christian anarchist, self-regulation meant allowing
people to be governed by the goodness of God within
themselves. This, of course, was a concept rejected by
strict rationalists like Ferrer and anti-religious thinkers like
Stimer. Yet if the religious argument is overlooked, there
are possible grounds for agreement between Stimer and
Tolstoy on the issue of self-regulation, centering on the
relationship between teacher and student. Both Stimer and
Tolstoy would probably have agreed that self -regulation is
impossible as long as the traditional teacher-student
relationship exists and the school continues consciously to
plan a particular outcome.
48
STIRNER’S ANALYSIS of the relationship between stu-
dent and teacher was one of his most profound contribu-
tions to the understanding of the enslavement of humanity
in the modem world. Ownership of self was more than just
a matter of not forcing moral imperatives and dogma on
the individual; it was also a matter of free exercise of the
will. The very existence of a teacher-to-student relation-
ship froze the will of the individual. In fact this rela-
tionship prepared individuals to give up their wills to the
authority of social institutions.
Stimer believed that knowledge which was taught
turned individuals into learners rather than creative per-
sons. Learners lost their freedom of will through increasing
dependency on experts and institutions for instructions on
how to act. They were without free will because they
depended on learning how to act rather than determining
for themselves how to act.
Where will a creative person be educated instead of a
learning one, where does the teacher turn into a
fellow worker, where does he recognize knowledge as
turning into will, where does the free man count as a
goal and not the merely educated ? [emphasis
added ] 19
To avoid turning people into mere learners, the goal of
pedagogy should be self-development— in the sense of an
individual gaining self-awareness and the ability to act. The
existing schools worked against the freedom of the will.
In discussing the development of education up to his
time, Stimer argued that following the Reformation,
education in the humanistic tradition was a source of
power: “. . . . education, as a power, raised him who
49
possessed it over the weak, who lacked it, and the
educated man counted ... as the mighty, the powerful,
the imposing one: for he was an authority.” The rise of the
idea of universal schooling, on the other hand, undermined
the authority of the humanist scholar with a new system
designed to produce citizens trained for practical life.
Authority in the system of popular education was not that
of one person over another; it was the authority of the
dogma of the practical and useful. This new educational
authority meant not subservience to the scholar, but
subservience to an ideology of pragmatism. Neither idea
was to Stimer’s liking, “. . . only scholars come out of the
menageries of the humanists, only ‘useful citizens’ out of
those of the realists, both of whom are indeed nothing but
subservient people.” Education for practical life, Stimer
believed, produced people of principle who acted accord-
ing to maxims. “Most college students,” he stated, “are
living examples of this sad turn of events. Trained in the
most excellent manner, they go on in training; drilled, they
continue drilling .” 2 0
In the framework of Stimer’s argument the growth of
public schools in the nineteenth century takes on added
meaning. As we have pointed out, the schools were tied to
the idea of turning out useful citizens trained for practical
life. The school assumed responsibility for the whole child.
Individual free will and initiative became subservient to the
expertise of the teacher. The enslavement of the individual
was the result of the actions of the individual being turned
over to the production line of education.
l|ii To understand this concept fully one must place it
within the broad historical framework of the development
of the school. What Stimer was witnessing in the nine-
teenth-century school was the steady institutionalization
of the socialization process. Some form of school had
always existed in Western society but its role had been
what Tolstoy referred to as instruction and teaching, not
education. Schools existed often on a voluntary basis to
50
teach reading, writing, and skills needed for the church or
business. Churches, of course, developed schools for their
own moral purposes. Most of the ways an individual
learned how to act were a part of growing and living within
the family and community. There was little separation
between the socialization process and the world in which
individuals acted out their lives. Willing and acting were a
part of life and one saw one’s actions as a product of one’s
interactions with society.
The school was fast becoming the central agency for
socialization, though. It was assuming more and more
responsibility for completely educating or shaping the
individual. Socialization became more a product of the life
of the school than of the life of the community. By the
end of the nineteenth century, educators like John Dewey
were expressing concern about this situation, demanding
that the school become a community that reflected the
real life of the surrounding world. From the viewpoint of
educators like Dewey the school had to be accepted as the
central agency of socialization— the problem was to make
it effective by turning it into a real community.
Stirner asserted that within the school knowledge did
not grow as part of a process of action and exercise of will,
but was taught by a teacher and then acted upon by the
student. What the school really taught the individual was
how to be a learner. This took Stirner far beyond many
other libertarian educators of the nineteenth century. He
would have rejected Ferrer, not because Ferrer wanted a
non-dogmatic education, but because he wanted a school.
In Tolstoy’s terms, Stimer wanted a society where
socialization was a product of culture and not of edu-
cation. Ownership of self meant freedom from dogma and
moral imperatives and a will that did not depend on
authoritarian sources. Ownership of self meant freedom
from schools themselves.
In the twentieth century this theme has been elaborated
upon by Ivan Illich. Illich sees the teacher-student relation-
51
ship as the backbone of the enslavement of modem
humanity to a mass consumer society. He argues that what
people learn in school is to trust the judgment of the
educator and distrust their own judgment. In school one
learns proper and socially useful ways of working, study-
ing, using leisure time, and enjoying life. This prepares one
to accept a society that provides packages and programs
for all aspects of life. The will is frozen until an expert
prescribes or approves. Illich wrote in 1971,
... in a service centered economy man is estranged
from what he can “do” as well as from what he can
“make,” ... he has delivered his mind and heart over
to therapeutic treatment even more completely than
he has sold away the fruits of his labor.
For Illich, “Schools have alienated man from his learning.”
The process of schooling turns the individual completely
over to the control and authority of experts and in-
stitutions. 2 1
Explicit in Illich ’s thinking and implicit in Stimer’s is
the idea that the only solution would be the creation of a
society in which schools would neither exist nor be
necessary. This would not mean the end of institutions to
pass on skills, but the end of institutions with curriculums
designed to make people into something, to manipulate
them. Knowledge and learning within such a society would
be linked to real-life processes and personal usefulness.
Knowledge and learning would not be placed in a special
institution.
Implied in the concept of a society without schools is
the end of all other institutions which are breeding
grounds for dogma and moral imperatives. In a sense the
church and state are themselves schools, with ideas of how
people should act and what they ought to be. A society
without schools would be one without institutions of
mysticism and authority. It would be a society of
52
self-regulation where institutions would be products of
personal need and usefulness and not sources of power.
Certainly Francisco Ferrer might have responded to the
idea of deschooling society by saying that one could not
wish a non-authoritarian society into being and that the
Modem School was the beginning of a plan to move in that
direction. Stirner never fully dealt with the problem of
passing on knowledge without filling the head with wheels
and ideals. But he was sure, as Elizabeth Burns Ferm (an
American educator and eventually the head of an Amer-
ican -style Modem School) wrote in 1907, that the
educator to be avoided was the one that endeavored “to
make and leave an impression on the child.” 2 2
IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY libertarian groups have
tried to implement these educational goals, either by
creating non-authoritarian schools or by rejecting the
concept of schooling altogether. Those who sought to
establish libertarian institutions of schooling envisioned
learning centers that would avoid the institutionalization
of controls.
One of the problems that has confronted contemporary
libertarians is that they live in a highly organized and
rationalized technological society which leaves little room
for the individual to grow and develop through the
exercise of individual will. Urban industrial society is
already so highly organized that children can find little
opportunity to explore and construct their own world.
Added to this is the uniformity of the equipment available
to educational leaders— mass-produced learning aids and
playthings which are used to rationalize the development
of the individual. The libertarian tradition requires not
53
only freedom from the imposition of ideology but also
freedom for self-development, and the twentieth century
has witnessed a wide variety of educational experiments
designed to create environments for self-development.
The Modem School movement begun by Ferrer and
A.S. Neill’s Summerhill represent part of this libertarian
concern; in the 1950’s and 1960’s it was further evidenced
in a very widespread movement for the establishment of
“free schools” and alternative forms of education. The free
school movement was an attempt to establish an environ-
ment for self-development in a world that was considered
overly structured and rationalized. One of the precursors
of the “free school” idea of the 1960’s, for instance, was
the development of the “free playground” movement in
the 1940’s. This movement was an expression of libertar-
ian concern about reshaping the world so that people
could control and use it for their own purposes. 2 3 The
first free playground was begun in Copenhagen in 1943
and shortly after World War II the idea spread to Sweden,
Switzerland, and the United States. In Stockholm the
playground was known as “Freetown,” in Minneapolis as
“The Yard,” and in Switzerland as “Robinson Crusoe
playgrounds.” The basic principle of the adventure play-
ground was that it was equipped only with raw material
and tools, lumber, nails, junk metal, shovels, and building
equipment. There was no manufactured equipment such as
swings or see-saws; essentially the children were given the
means to build, destroy, and rebuild their playgrounds. 2 4
The interesting thing about the adventure playground
movement is its implicit criticism of a new component of
authoritarian control: the urban-industrial environment
itself, as represented in the highly structured school and
playground. Manufactured equipment on the playground
tends to structure play itself, and leave little room for
creativity or experiment. In this sense a free school or a
free playground could provide an opportunity for the child
to experience an unstructured environment.
54
In this context one can understand that libertarian
involvement in the free school movement of the 1960’s
was taking one solution to the problem of education : free
schools as an oasis from authoritarian control and as a
means of passing on the knowledge to be free. On the
surface one could argue that the term “free school” was
contradictory. How could a school be free if, as Tolstoy
argued, a school was a conscious attempt to turn one into
a “something”? The free school movement was, and still is,
a very complex phenomenon with roots partly in Freudian
and Reichian psychology, as represented in A.S. Neill’s
Summerhill, and partly in traditional libertarian concerns
about authority, as best exemplified in Ferrer and the
Modern Schools. Part of the movement can be explained,
as we shall see in the chapter on Reich and Neill, in terms
of changing psychological perspectives, and part of the
movement can be explained in terms of an attempt to
provide a free and unstructured environment. George
Dennison, one of the popular leaders of the free school
movement, wrote in 1966 that his “First Street School is
radical and experimental. There are no grades, no graded
report cards, no competitive examinations. No child is
compelled to study or answer questions when he does not
want to.” 2 5 At first glance there would appear to be very
little that was “radical” about a situation without grades,
report cards, or examinations. After all, that is the way
things “should” be. But placed in a broader perspective,
these changes were radical in the sense that the First Street
School represented a refuge from a society that was highly
structured and graded and left little room for self-
development.
One of the major spokesmen for the free school
movement was America’s leading libertarian philosopher,
Paul Goodman. Goodman wrote not only about schooling
but also about the nature and direction of modem society.
He was one of the leading spokesmen for the decentraliza-
tion of urban and technological structures. Concerned with
55
maximizing individual autonomy, he argued for the decen-
tralization of industry to a local level so that the individual
could directly control the use of technology. In the same
manner he argued for decentralization and democratic
local control of bureaucracies. 2 6
Goodman continued the libertarian tradition by arguing
that schooling had become a process by which the
individual was stamped, graded, certified, and returned to
society. All of this, he argued, was for the benefit of the
ruling industrial elite. He wrote in Compulsory Mis-
Education in the early 1960’s that the real function of
education was to grade and market skills. “This means, in
effect, that a few great corporations are getting the benefit
of an enormous weeding out and selective process— all
children are fed into the mill and everybody pays for
it.” 2 7 Goodman’s plans for education involved the decen-
tralization of large and cumbersome school systems and
the establishment of small-scale schools. He offered a plan
which together with A.S. Neill’s ideas gave direction to the
free school movement. Goodman suggested that in some
cases schools could dispense with their classes and use
streets, stores, museums, movies, and factories as places of
learning. The use of certified teachers could be dispensed
with and people like the druggist, the storekeeper, and the
factory worker could be used as teachers. And, most
important, the school would be non -compulsory. Within
cities it would be reduced to a mini-school which through
decentralization would be influenced by the desires of the
students and the neighborhood community. 2 8
IT WAS IVAN ILLICH in the late 1960’s who gave the
libertarian tradition new life both in terms of criticisms
and proposals. Illich argues that schools themselves are the
56
problem. They are a source of ideological control, and
they reproduce and reinforce the existing social structure.
The schools also serve to alienate people from their
learning and make them dependent on the authority of
institutions and experts. Illich ’s proposals for deschooling
society overcome some of the inherent problems of the
free school movement. The free school movement has
assumed the need for something called a school to
overcome the problems of an existing structured society.
The danger lies in the possibility that the free school
would become even more therapeutic, and create even
more dependency , than the established school. What
individuals might actually learn in such a school was that
they needed an institution to give them freedom. Illich
rejects the concept of the free school and argues that true
autonomy can result only from changes in institutional
styles. It is within this context that the deschooling of
society is to take place.
Ivan Illich ’s concept of what education should be is very
much like Tolstoy’s. In fact, one could argue that he is
within this traditional stream of Christian anarchism. Both
Illich and Tolstoy want people to have the chance to
experience culture without the creation of an institution
called the school which tries consciously to turn people
into something, to shape people according to a pre-
conceived goal, by means of an organized curriculum.
The most pressing problem of the modem world, Illich
argues, is to change the style of institutions and tech-
nology so that they work for the benefit of the individual.
A series of “public utilities” for education which people
could use for their own purposes would serve this goal.
These utilities would be organized so that no one could
gain a position of power in them. Essentially what Illich
proposes is dividing the functions of schooling into
separate and distinct units. For instance, he suggests a
public utility that would be an information center, a kind
of expanded library where books and other media would
57
be available, as well as information on such things as
visiting industrial centers and on opportunities to observe a
variety of community activities. Another distinct utility
would be a place where people could register their
skills— typing, fishing, bricklaying, knowledge of history,
etc. Those who wished to learn a skill could then find
someone who had that skill and was willing to teach it. At
both the information center and the skill center individuals
would be free to choose whatever information or skills
they wanted to learn. There would be no one in a position
to make those decisions for the individual nor decide what
was in the individual’s best interest. The divorce of the two
functions would avoid the possibility of the development
of an extended and graded curriculum. There might be a
curriculum within a skill like typing, but this curriculum
would not extend beyond that particular skill. In other
words, the curriculum planning would be completely
turned over to the individual. Illich also proposes another
utility or communications system as a means of linking
people of common interests. This could be either com-
puter matching, journals dealing with specific interests, or
simple notices in which people would register the interests
that they wished to share . 2 9
Illich ’s exploration of differing institutional styles ex-
presses traditional libertarian interests more consistently
than the free schools, which served as oases of free activity
but failed to effect any change in the overall structure of
society. They were schools with planned purposes and as
■m' such always stood the chance of being used as institutions
III hi 1 of control. Illich ’s plans emphasize the separation of
learning and control. In the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, William Godwin, Max Stimer, Leo Tolstoy, and
other anarchists recognized this as one of the fundamental
problems for modern society. In the twentieth century,
with the expansion of schooling and psychological tech-
niques of control within the school, the problem has
58
3
THE GROWTH OF
CONSCIOUSNESS:
MARX TO FREIRE
KARL MARX REFERRED to Max Stimer as a man in
revolt against the “rule of thoughts,” who believed that if
you taught people “to knock them out of their heads . . .
existing reality . . . would collapse .” 1 This, Marx said, was
very much like believing that drowning resulted from
people being possessed with the idea of gravity; if you
knocked the idea out of their heads by showing it to be a
superstition or a religious idea, it “would be proof against
any danger from water.” It was not enough to talk about
the “spooks” controlling human consciousness without
talking about the social reality which produced those
spooks. This link between social reality and consciousness
had important implications for pedagogical methods,
becoming a key element in the educational proposals of
twentieth-century humanist psychologists like Carl Rogers
and in the pedagogical techniques of the Brazilian educator
Paulo Freire.
61
Paulo Freire, in conducting literacy programs for adults
in Brazil in the mid-twentieth century, developed a
perspective which combined educational methods with this
Marxian concept of consciousness. The separation of
thought and action is overcome by linking learning to will
and social action. Learning becomes an instrument for
individual liberation. Freire first set forth his educational
method in his doctoral dissertation at the University of
Recife in Brazil in 1959. While working as Professor of
History and Philosophy of Education at the same univer-
sity, his teaching methods were implemented throughout
the northeastern part of Brazil. After the military coup of
1964, Freire was jailed by the government for his
educational activities. He was “invited” to leave the
country and spent the next five years working in Chile,
then became a consultant at Harvard University. Freire’s
lectures at Ivan Illich’s Center for Intercultural Documen-
tation in Mexico in 1970 and 1971 attracted students from
throughout South America. In Mexico and other Latin
American countries his techniques have been implemented
in both rural and urban settings. Freire must be considered
one of the most important educational philosophers of the
twentieth century.
At the heart of Freire’s educational method is a concept
of humanity which owes its origin to Marx’s concern with
the development of individual consciousness and alienation
in modem society. His concept of human potential in
many ways fulfills the meaning of consciousness as defined
by Marx and gives expression to Stimer’s concept of
ownership of self. One must understand Freire’s concept
of humanity in order to grasp his educational method.
Freire’s whole technique stands in danger of being trivial-
ized unless this concept is emphasized.
The goal of social life, Freire argues, is the humanization
of the world. By this he means a process by which each
person becomes conscious of the social forces working
upon him or her, reflects upon those forces, and becomes
62
capable of transforming the world. To be human is to be
an actor who makes choices and seeks to guide one’s own
destiny. To be free, to be an actor, means knowing who
one is and how one has been shaped by the surrounding
social world. It is one’s social world and environment that
determine the nature of one’s consciousness and ideology.
Without a knowledge and awareness of that determination,
humanization is impossible.
The opposite of a humanized world, in Freire’s terms, a
dehumanized world, is one without self-awareness, without
a consciousness of the historical forces determining exis-
tence. Without this consciousness people are unable to
become actors in the stream of history and are simply
acted upon by history. This condition of oppression is
what Freire calls the culture of silence. The culture of
silence can be a product either of simple ignorance or of
education itself. By being kept in a state of simple
ignorance, the peasant in Brazil can be locked in this
culture of silence, never realizing the forces that caused his
or her poverty. On the other hand, an educational program
which only assimilates the peasant into the very social
system which caused impoverishment in the first place, is
not a liberatory force. Freire would have agreed with
Stirner that education can produce wheels in the head that
stand in the way of consciousness of self.
This concept of humanization implies, as Marx stated,
that “consciousness can never be anything else than
conscious existence, and the existence of men is their
actual life-process.” In a pedagogical sense this means that
to expand consciousness is to make one aware of one’s life
processes. From Marx’s standpoint, however, life was not
determined by consciousness but consciousness by life,
and it was this criticism that he leveled at Stirner. The
interaction of an individual with the world determined his
or her subjective view of the world and of self. In other
words, an individual learned a concept of self, whom he or
she was, by the nature of his or her relationships to
63
society. Human interaction with the world also produced
an ideology and an understanding of the world. As Marx
wrote, “We set out from real, active men, and on the basis
of their real life-process we demonstrate the development
of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-
process .’' 2
For Freire, to know the objective world is to begin to
know oneself. If learning is to be meaningful, it must be
tied to the life process of the individual. Freire’s method
of teaching illiterates began with a concrete study of the
everyday lives of the people. For example, in a small
village a team of educators would work in cooperation
with the villagers to develop thematic representations of
the life processes of the residents. These would then be
presented to the villagers in the form of pictures, tapes, or
any appropriate media. The thematic representations
would contain certain problems and contradictions in the
culture which could serve as the basis for discussion. In
Freire’s words,
Utilizing certain basic contradictions, we must pose
this existential, concrete, present situation to the
people as a problem which challenges them and
requires a response— not just at the intellectual level,
but at the level of action . 3
One example presented a scene of a drunken man walking |
on a street and three men standing on a comer talking.
This scene was shown to a group of tenement dwellers in
Santiago to raise questions about the causal relationships
within their particular social organization and culture . 4
The discussions resulting from such thematic representa-
tions would be the source for the words that would form
the basis of the literacy campaign.
Language is tied directly to the life processes of the
learner and thus becomes a source of self-understanding.
As individuals progress in reading and writing by using
64
words that help them understand their world, their
awareness of self constantly expands. For Freire, acquiring
literacy through thematic representations becomes a means
of objectifying the individual’s world. It gives the in-
dividual the necessary tools for thinking about the world.
A culture of silence is one in which people are unable to
distance themselves from their life activity, making it
impossible for them to rise to the level of reflection. The
dialogue around thematic representations provides a means
toward reflection and a basis for both literacy and
self-c onsciousness .
Within this framework learning becomes a source of
liberation and a tool for social change. People are
dehumanized because they lack a full awareness of their
life activity. This is why people in a culture of silence do
nothing to change their world. Freire agrees with Marx
that “the animal is one with its life activity. It does not
distinguish the activity from itself. It is its activity .” 5 In
this sense, those in a culture of silence remain at a level of
mere animal activity; in fact, the source of economic and
political oppression is precisely the reduction of human
beings to this state. Freire wants to restore humanity to
the oppressed by giving them a conscious life. As Marx
wrote, “But man makes his life itself an object of his will
and consciousness. He has a conscious life activity. . . .
Conscious life activity distinguishes man from the life
activity of animals .” 6
For Marx, Freire, and the twentieth-century existen-
tialist psychologists, it is in the realm of consciousness that
the contradiction between freedom and determinism is
overcome. While consciousness and life activity are de-
termined by material conditions, a person who has no
consciousness of self, who has nothing but life activity, is
completely propelled by social forces. But the person who
is aware of these forces and conscious of their nature is
able to break with the trajectory of history and participate
in the radical change of self and society. Rollo May,
65
1 J;
l|l'H
writing about existential psychology in the mid-twentieth
century, argues that while psychology must recognize
deterministic factors and human finiteness,
In the revealing and exploring of these deterministic
forces in the patient’s life, the patient is orienting
himself in some particular way to the data and thus is
engaged in some choice, no matter how seemingly
insignificant; is experiencing some freedom, no
matter how subtle . 7
And it is precisely toward this relationship to the
individual’s world that Freire’s educational method is
meant to lead.
In this method the tying of language and learning to the
life processes is meant to overcome the separation of
thought and action. The dialogue based on thematic
representations of everyday life is meant to grow into a
greater consciousness of the surrounding social reality.
Theory and activity are to be brought together in social
action. According to Freire, “. . . a revolution is achieved
with neither verbalism nor activism, but rather with praxis,
that is, with reflection and action directed at the structures
to be transformed.” A drawing of tenement living condi-
tions might be presented to the poor of an area and from
this would grow a reflective process questioning the
conditions and their social causes. No theory as to why the
conditions existed would be given to the poor; rather,
theory would be a product of the reflection and action of
the people themselves.
The leaders cannot treat the oppressed as mere
activists to be denied the opportunity of reflection
and allowed merely the illusion of acting. ... It is
absolutely essential that the oppressed participate in
the revolutionary process with an increasingly critical
awareness of their role as subjects of the transforma-
tion . 8
This praxis would end the separation of thought and
action that Marx had argued was contributing to human
fragmentation and alienation. The origins of this sepa-
ration, according to Marx’s interpretation, lay in the
historical development of the separation of classes and the
division of labor. The separation of manual and mental
labor in the development of civilization permitted the
separation of consciousness from life activity. Marx wrote
in The German Ideology that with the division between
mental and manual labor
consciousness can really flatter itself that it is
something other than consciousness of existing prac-
tice, that it is really conceiving something without
conceiving something real-, from now on conscious-
ness is in a position to emancipate itself from the
world and to proceed to the formation of “pure”
theory, theology, philosophy, ethics, etc . 9
Marx also saw this division between theory and practice
as resulting from the organization of modern industry. In
Capital he argued that the worker became a mere
appendage of the machine, trapped in a life of endless
drudgery and routine. Intellectual and reflective powers
were not brought into use in manual labor. Marx wrote,
The separation of the intellectual powers of produc-
tion from the manual labour, and the conversion of
those powers into the might of capital over labour, is,
as we have already shown, finally completed by
modem industry erected on the foundation of
machinery.
People in the modem factory organization were forced
into specialized and limited roles with the intellectual
activity a function of the managers and owners. Individual
skill and worth, Marx argued, “vanishes as an infinitesimal
quantity before the science, the gigantic physical forces,
66
67
and the mass of labour that are embodied in the factory
mechanism. . . ,” 1 0
Separation of thought and action means that theory
becomes a product of a class which is separated from life
activity. It means that individuals experience a fragmenta-
tion of their powers, becoming appendages of the machine
rather than giving it control or direction. John Dewey, for
instance, wrote in Education and Democracy that the
separation of liberal education from industrial and profes-
sional education was a result “of a division of classes into
those who had to labor for a living and those who were
relieved from this necessity.” Workers, he aruged, had no
insight into the social aims of their work and, conse-
quently, the “results actually achieved are not the ends of
their actions, but only of their employers .” 1 1
FREIRE ARGUES THAT traditional education was prem-
ised on what he calls the “banking” method of education—
the idea that a student is an object into which knowledge
is placed, not a subject in the learning process. This
banking method of education, Freire argues, shares many
of the properties of an oppressive society: “the teacher
teaches and the students are taught”; “the teacher thinks
and the students are thought about”; “the teacher acts and
the students have the illusion of acting through the action
of the teacher”; and “the teacher is the subject of the
learning process, while the pupils are mere objects .” 12 In
adult literacy programs the banking theory manifests itself
in the use of reading material which has little relationship
to the life activity of the learner. Rather, such programs
attempt to work upon and change the learner.
The fact that the banking theory turns the learner into
an object reflects the assumption that the fundamental
problem is not with society but with the individual. In
other words, in the case of poverty a banking system of
68
education assumes poverty exists because the poor do not
know how to function properly within society. The goal of
education, then, is to change the behavior of the poor so
that it conforms to the needs of a society which created
poverty in the first place. In the very process of educating
the poor, all blame is placed upon them. They are
condemned, essentially by being told they have failed.
In this manner the consciousness of the oppressed is
changed without changing the oppressive conditions of
society. Education as banking is not liberating but con-
tributes to the docility and alienation of the oppressed.
Marx’s concept of alienation illuminates the full meaning
of Freire’s criticism of the banking method. For Marx,
work should function to objectify the self and hence
provide the individual with a source of self-awareness.
Work or activity that becomes foreign to or alienated from
the individual— as it does in the case of the banking
method of education— does not fulfill this function. In
answer to the question of what constitutes the alienation
of labor, Marx wrote: “First, that the work is external to
the worker, that it is not part of his nature; and that,
consequently, he does not fulfill himself in his work but
denies himself. . . .” 13 In the same manner the learning
material of the banking method stands in opposition to the
learner. Instead of affirming the learner’s life and providing
tools for greater understanding, it denies that life and
obscures self-awareness.
Within this framework Marx’s concept of human aliena-
tion is very similar to Freire’s concept of the human being
as the object of teaching. For Marx alienation meant that
work or life activity is not an object for individual
fulfillment; rather, the individual becomes a mere object
used for production. “The alienation of the worker in his
product,” he wrote, “means not only that his labor
becomes an object, assumes an external existence, but that
it exists independently, outside himself, and alien to him,
and that it stands opposed to him as an autonomous
power .” 14
Similarly, in the banking method of education the
learner’s self becomes an object of the educational process,
worked upon to achieve goals external to itself. The goals
and content of this kind of education are not a product of
the learner, they are not subject to his or her control. The
learner is viewed as an object, a means for achieving the
teacher’s end. The object of teaching is not to understand
the self but to change the individual in accordance with
alien goals. For instance, the banking method of education
not only tells the poor they are the problem, but also
establishes a model of what they should be which is alien
to what they are.
The model presented to the oppressed of what they
should be like is a model shaped by the oppressor. Such a
model inherently tends to perpetuate the existing social
structure. Thus both the content and moral imperatives of
the banking method reflect the ideology of the ruling class.
As Marx wrote, “The ideas of the ruling class are in every
epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class, which is the ruling
material force of society, is at the same time its ruling
intellectual force .” 1 5
What the banking method of education achieves is the
creation of a consciousness which is alien to the learner.
The poor are given a model based on the life and actions of
the rich. Such models were just what Stimer had criticized
as moral imperatives which force people to act in
contradiction to their own needs and liberation.
ONE OF THE GOALS of Freire’s method is to bring those
in a culture of silence to an understanding of self which
would allow them to expel the internalized image of the
dominant class.
70
. . . when the dominated classes reproduce the dom-
inators’ style of life, it is because the dominators live
“within” the dominated. The dominated can eject the
dominators only by getting distance from them and
objectifying them. Only then can they recognize
them as their antitheses . 1 6
For example, this was precisely the situation confronted
by black people in the United States in their relationship
to white society. By internalizing the style of life of the
white population they were internalizing the very culture
which had been responsible for slavery and racial segrega-
tion. For instance, black people discovered that they had
adopted the same standards of beauty— fair skin and
Caucasian facial features — as white members of the society.
The slogan “Black is Beautiful” represented the beginning
of the ejection of this false consciousness.
Freire’s method is thus directed both at the expansion
of consciousness and at the ejection of the false conscious-
ness created by the structure of society. In this sense he
combines the traditional Marxist concern about over-
coming alienation with the traditional libertarian desire for
freedom from imposed moral imperatives. This means that
peasants in Latin America must be given the tools to lift
themselves out of the culture of silence and gain conscious
control over the social forces affecting their lives. People
must be helped to see that part of the problem is their own
acceptance of “success” as it has been defined for them by
the dominant class. They must begin to treat their own
lives as authentic and not to reject their own realities on
the basis of the values of the dominant class.
Without the ejection of these values, social change
would mean only that one oppressive faction takes the
place of another— essentially a change in palace guard
without any change in the palace. This would not meet the
criteria of a humanistic revolution, which can only be
accomplished through individual liberation of conscious-
ness, through the participation of all people in social
change.
THE RADICALISM OF FREIRE’S PRAXIS, which ties
together reflection and action, can be more fully appre-
ciated if it is compared to the ideas of a humanist
psychologist like Carl Rogers. Rogers’ therapy, and what
he calls student-centered teaching, is based on a concept of
self-actualization and self-awareness very similar to Freire’s
ideas. The drive for self-actualization is what Freire calls
the “humanism of man (sic)”; it is a desire to gain greater
conscious control over one’s environment. Rogers writes
that self-actualization means movement “in the direction
of greater independence or self-responsibility ... in the
direction of increasing self-government, self -regulation, and
autonomy, and away from heteronymous control, or
control by external forces .” 17 Self-actualization is
achieved through what Rogers calls congruence of the
personality. “We may say,” he writes, “that freedom from
inner tension, or psychological adjustment, exists when the
I concept of self is at least roughly congruent with all the
experiences of the organism .” 18 In other words, psycho-
! logical adjustment occurs when one’s concept of self
corresponds to the forces that have shaped that self.
Congruence of personality means that one has an aware-
ness of the social forces shaping personality and an ability
i to control and give direction to those forces,
j But humanist psychologists like Rogers fail to relate
! personality to the structure of society and to go beyond
“ f self-actualization to the transformation of society. It is
after all the organization of society which assumes a major
share of the responsibility for non-congruence and lack of
self-actualization. The failure to analyze social and polit-
ical implications is what makes humanist psychology
superficial. It is more of a technique for management and
adjustment than for changing society. This is one reason
why methods like those of Carl Rogers have become
popular among school leaders in the United States.
72
These limitations become apparent when humanist
psychologists talk about social change. For Carl Rogers the
key to social change is a self-actualized person who creates
a climate which allows for self-actualization of other
people. Rogers calls this the “chain reaction” effect of
client-centered therapy.
Here is a theoretical basis for sound interpersonal,
intergroup, and international relationships. . . . This
atmosphere of understanding and acceptance is the
very climate most likely to create a therapeutic
experience and consequent self-acceptance in the
person who is exposed to it.
For Rogers it is the “psychological ‘chain reaction’
which appears to have tremendous potentialities for the
handling of problems of social relationships .” 1 9 This
is a utopian vision which is to grow from the warm
acceptance of all people. Compared to Freire’s humanized
individual engaged in changing self and the world, Rogers’
self-actualized person appears incomplete.
The political and social implications of Freire’s method
become evident in his demonstration of the relationship
between levels of individual consciousness and levels of
development of political and social organization. Indi-
vidual liberation through education is closely tied to stages
of social liberation. This relationship clearly is not the
same as Rogers’ “chain reaction” of acceptance, but is
rather a process of turning the individual’s learning into
self -liberation by working to create a liberated society.
Another important point about Freire’s attempt to link
levels of conscious development to political and social
reality is that it makes his educational theory universal,
establishing its relevance for highly industrialized societies
as well as for those of the Third World.
In Freire’s model the lowest level of consciousness is, of
course, the culture of silence in the peasant societies of the
Third World. In Latin America this takes the form of a
73
rural/urban split, with the rural areas dominated by and
dependent on the ruling elites of the urban centers. As
stated above, the dependent society accepts the values and
life style of the dominator and cannot achieve self-
awareness. “This results,” Freire writes,
in the duality of the dependent society, its ambiguity,
its being and not being itself, and the ambivalence
characteristic of its long experience of dependency,
both attracted by and rejecting the metropolitan
society. 2 0
Individuals at this level of consciousness tend to ascribe
the cause of their plight to self-blame or to supernatural
sources. For example, peasants might feel that hunger is
caused by their own incapacity or that it represents the
anger of the gods. In Freire’s educational process dialogue
about problem situations might at first tend to resort to
such explanations, but part of the goal of dialogue would
be to aid in going beyond that level of consciousness. The
culture of silence also exists in industrial countries.
Minority groups in the United States, for example, have
only recently been emerging from their own state of
dependence, throwing off their self-concepts of natural
incapacity and their internalization of the values and life
style of the dominator.
Freire’s next stage of consciousness and social develop-
ment is very close to the level of development of most
industrial countries. He calls this stage naive-transitiveness
because it refers to the beginning of a popular conscious-
ness, one which has not fully emerged from the culture of
silence. At this stage pressure and criticism begin to be
applied to the dominant groups in the society. The leaders
of a society might respond to this by allowing superficial
changes and granting certain political and economic
privileges in order to maintain their control. But these
changes would still result in a heightening of popular
74
consciousness. The situation would be analogous to a
prison in which an attempt is made to satisfy discontent
by allowing prisoners to exercise outdoors. The result for
the prisoners would be a heightened awareness of their
imprisonment. When a minor social reform is made, people
may gain an understanding of critical social problems and
may push for even greater changes.
In describing the transition of consciousness Freire is
trying to describe the developing political conditions in
both the Third World and industrialized countries. He
argues that the contradictions at the stage of naive-transi-
tiveness foster the growth of a populist leadership which
attempts to exploit the awakening consciousness of the
people for its own gain. At this stage, because the masses
cannot speak for themselves, they depend on populist
leaders. At the same time intellectuals and students start to
become engaged in social projects. Art becomes directed
toward problems of concrete social reality. The inherent
contradiction at this stage results from populist leaders
allowing the participation of youth groups and intellec-
tuals in the political process in order to control them. This
allows for the development of revolutionary leaders within
the political process itself. Freire’s description of this stage
of transition of consciousness sounds very much like the
situation in the United States in the 1960’s and early
1970’s. Populist political leaders attempted to manipulate
popular opinion by seeking help from intellectuals and
youth and by using protests of these groups to cement
their own political ranks.
For Freire, the revolutionary leadership would be
comprised of those who help the masses move from the
levels of semi-intransitive or naive-transitive consciousness
to the level of critical consciousness. He argues that if the
masses are not made the subject of the revolutionary
process rather than its object, the revolutionary project
will move to the right. A truly liberating revolution is one
in which the people assume the role of active subjects in
75
1
/
the transforming and recreating of the world. Freire sums
up the difference between cultural action of the left and of
the right: “The former problematizes, the latter slogan-
izes.” The right-wing revolutionary assumes that people
have to be shaped to fit the “utopian” vision of the
leaders. The left-wing revolutionary assumes that the
people themselves must make the utopian vision.
For Freire the role of a critical consciousness cannot
stop even with the birth of a revolutionary society. Critical
consciousness plays a role in ejecting those cultural myths
which remain. It is also “a force countering the bureau-
cracy, which threatens to deaden the revolutionary vision
and dominate the people in the very name of their
freedom.” While Freire does not speak directly of the
Russian revolution, it is probably the example he had in
mind. The failure of the revolutionary cause and the swing
to the right in the Soviet Union can be linked to the defeat
of the power of the local soviets and the end of the mass
participation of the people in the revolutionary en-
deavor . 2 1 The large-scale bureaucratic machinery that
developed made the people into mere objects of economic
and social planning, instead of active, critical subjects with
control over social institutions. The new “socialist man
and woman” have yet to be bom in the Soviet Union.
Revolutionary change would not necessarily result from
the contradictions arising under populist leadership, how-
ever. The other possible direction, Freire believes, along
with Illich and others, would be the creation of a mass
society. This would involve a change in consciousness from
the transitive state to a pathological form of “irrational
consciousness.” Highly technological societies may be
moving toward a future where specialization in work
becomes so narrow that people are generally incapable of
thinking. In a dehumanized mass society, people no longer
participate in the transformation of society. Freire writes,
“Men begin thinking and acting according to the prescrip-
tions they receive daily from the communications media
76
r
rather than in response to their dialectical relationships
with the world.” In a mass society almost all consciousness
of self is lost. Gone is the element of risk and planning on
an individual level. “They do not have to think about even
the smallest things; there is always some manual which
says what to do in situation ‘a’ or ‘b’.” The mass society is
a well-schooled society where people have given up
independent thinking for mere learning based on expert
advice. As in one of Freire’s examples, “Rarely do men
have to pause at a street comer to think which direction to
follow. There’s always an arrow which de-problematizes
the situation.” While street signs are not evil “they are
among thousands of directional signals in a technological
society which, introjected by men, hinder their capacity
for critical thinking .” 2 2
While Freire’s educational work grew out of a concern
for the problems of South American society it has
universal relevance as a definition of humanism and as an
educational method. Obviously the method is not limited
to one age group but can be applied to all people in all
societies. If one applies the model to a country like the
United States, for example, it raises some very important
issues. It has already been suggested that within this
framework minority groups in the United States can be
considered as being at the level of a culture of silence or at
a level of intransitive consciousness. Furthermore, the
majority of other Americans can be classified as being in a
state of transitive consciousness or existing with the
“irrational consciousness” of a mass society. The concept
of mass society represents an extension of Freire’s crit-
icism of the banking method of education. The individual,
an object within the mass society, is taught how to use his
or her tools and conveniences properly. In such a society
no situation becomes problematical or calls for individual
praxis. People are dehumanized because of the lack of
interrelationship between consciousness and practice.
It seems obvious what Freire’s method means for a
77
country like the United States. It means that learning must
result from praxis. Learning must be directly connected to
social problems and used to solve those problems. It means
a recognition of the teaching of reading as the most
political act in the educational process. Language is the
tool an individual uses to relate to his or her world. Taught
in the manner of the banking method, it becomes a tool
for the stifling of consciousness. Taught as part of a
continued expansion of consciousness, it becomes an
instrument for self-liberation. To be taught how to read in
a situation which is completely abstracted from self-
understanding is to be, in Illich’s terms, “well-schooled.”
Black people in the United States certainly discovered this
when they began to look closely at the white, small-town
bias of public school text books.
One can go about implementing Freire’s methods in
various ways, depending on the skills and the imagination
of the group leader. For instance, one might teach reading
in a middle-class suburb by beginning with some thematic
representation of a community problem— pollution, per-
haps, or, on a more unsophisticated level for small
children, one might take up such everyday themes as play,
fights, or family problems. The leader and the children
engage in a dialogue about the nature of the problem.
From this initial dialogue words are taken that begin to
form the basic text for reading. The children then work to
solve the problem, reflect on their attempted solutions,
add new words and stories to their readers and attempt to
develop theories about the situation. In a poor urban area
themes dealing with crime, poverty, family problems, and
pollution could be used. In both examples the actual
themes would not be chosen until after careful investi-
gation. In this manner action, learning and consciousness
would develop together.
FREIRE’S METHOD DEPENDS on dealing with real and
important problems. The problems cannot be artificial
classroom contrivances. This, of course, means that
whether the method is trivialized or not depends on the
group leader. Freire assumes that the contradictions of the
culture of transitive consciousness will produce that
revolutionary leadership. This optimism might not be
shared by everyone.
There is also an assumption in Freire’s method that
people will want to become self-aware and that once this is
accomplished, they will act in their own interests and in a
rational manner. For what if people resist real freedom and
self-awareness? The problem of individual freedom extends
beyond just consciousness to include human character
structure. For example, Wilhelm Reich argued that Marx
would not have been able to explain the rise of fascism in
Germany in the 1930’s because he lacked the tools for
understanding character structure, especially the particular
character structure which sought the security of an
authoritarian state. From this particular view the imple-
mentation of Freire’s humanized world requires another
element. It requires liberating the character structure of
the individual so that self-awareness and a desire for
self-determination become possible. It also implies that the
establishment of a liberated world means changing child-
rearing patterns and the family, so that people desire to be
and can be free.
(&
79
78
4
SEXUAL LIBERATION
AND SUMMERHILL:
REICH AND NEILL
CERTAINLY MAX STIRNER’S formulation of ownership
of self and Paulo Freire’s educational methods are meant
to lead to basic changes in the individual. But one of the
possible limitations of their arguments is that character
structure is deeply rooted in the early stages of the child’s
psychic development. That is, whether a child develops an
authoritarian or non-authoritarian style of social conduct
might depend more on early development than on later
forms of socialization such as formal education.
Concern about child-rearing practices and their relation-
ship to political and social revolution has centered around
the organization of the family itself. The value of
collective child-rearing practices versus the traditional
nuclear family is one of the major issues raised. The two
most important figures in this dialogue have been Wilhelm
Reich and A.S. Neill, who were closely associated in their
work during their later years.
81
Wilhelm Reich’s belief that the nature of child rearing
was directly related to forms of social organization,
resulted from his attempt to combine the sociology of
Marx with a reinterpretation of Freudian analysis. Reich
believed that it was possible for people to dispense with
the irrationalism of politics and government and to
establish what he called a “work-democracy” on the basis
of a self-regulating character structure. This would be a
society free of all authoritarian institutions— including the
political state— where social relationships would evolve
from economic organizations which would be created by
the workers themselves. He linked the authoritarian
character structure, which desired control by authoritarian
institutions, to child-rearing methods and sexual repres-
sion. For Reich the central educational task of the
twentieth century was sexual liberation and abolition of
the patriarchal family. When in 1937 A.S. Neill, the
founder of the Summerhill School in England, first met
Reich, Neill said, “Reich, you are the man I’ve been
looking for for years, the man who joins up the somatic
with the psychological. Can I come to you as a student?” 1
This association with Reich, which began after their initial
meeting in 1937, proved important in the development of
Neill’s ideas, as we shall see later.
TO UNDERSTAND REICH’S THEORY of the self-
regulating character structure one must understand his
differences with Freud. One of the basic points on which
they differed was the nature of aggression. Freud,
supporting an extremely conservative social philosophy,
argued that aggression was an innate human instinct and
that one’s relationship to civilization and to oneself was
best described in terms of conflict between the competing
instincts of thanatos (death) and eros (love) and reality. In
Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud claimed that social
82
order could only be maintained by the repression and
control of the aggressive death instinct. This control was
the function of authoritarian institutions. Freud’s picture
of civilization is not pleasant or hopeful. Humanity is torn
between eros, the passions of embracing the world, and
thanatos, the desire to destroy it. As civilization pro-
gresses, the aggressive instincts have to be repressed,
resulting in aggression toward self and increased feelings of
guilt. For Freud the inevitable price humanity pays for the
progress of civilization is increased authority and guilt. 2
If accepted, these cultural pronouncements undercut
the basis of utopian and revolutionary thought. Following
Freud, the most that one could achieve would be an
unhappy truce between one’s self and society. And
authoritarian institutions are necessary to control aggres-
sion and to guide the development of a strong superego.
Freud’s agrument is essentially one for “law and order.” It
suggests that if all police, laws, and traditional authori-
tarian child-rearing methods were dispensed with the result
would be the unleashing of thanatos and a bloodbath of
mutual destruction.
Reich rejected Freud’s concept of a death instinct.
Instead, he believed that cruel and aggressive character
traits were the result of authoritarian, sexually repressive
child-rearing practices. Sexual repression resulted in sexual
anxiety, which in turn caused a general pleasure anxiety.
Inability to experience pleasure and aggressive character
traits, Reich argued, were always found together. On the
other hand, ability to experience pleasure and non-hostile
character traits were also linked. At the center of Reich’s
concept of pleasure were the sexual drives. Unlike Freud,
who believed these drives were in conflict with the
aggressive instincts, Reich saw aggressiveness as the prod-
uct of the repression of sexual drives. In the 1920’s,
comparing sadistic and non-sadistic character traits, Reich
wrote, “The mildness and kindness of individuals capable
83
of genital satisfaction was striking in contrast. I have never
seen individuals capable of genital satisfaction who had
sadistic character traits.” 3
The revolutionary nature of Reich’s argument was that
it offered the possibility of planning a system of education
and even organizing a whole society, so as to eliminate
hostility and authoritarianism. It also suggested a method
of analyzing political structures in terms of their child-
i i j rearing practices. Authoritarian and repressive political
structures could be linked to educational practices which
reflected the same traits. This, Reich argued in the Mass
! j Psychology of Fascism, was certainly the case with the rise
i of fascism in Germany. He explained in The Sexual
Revolution that because of the Russian revolution’s failure
to carry out the promises of its early years— the revolu-
tionary moral codes and experimental practices in educa-
tion and child rearing— it had resulted not, as he had
hoped, in a non-repressive society, but in the emergence of
an authoritarian one.
I One of the primary aims of a revolutionary movement
must be the freeing of the character structure of the
people. This, Reich argued, could not be accomplished on
a mass scale through the use of psychotherapy. While
mental health clinics might be able to help a few patients,
their overall impact was quite limited. In the 1920’s, after
eight years of work in a psychoanalytic clinic, Reich
I realized that “Psychoanalysis is not a therapy for large-
scale application.” 4 Patients in the clinic required a daily
*i ! hour of therapy for at least six months. The only hope was
in prevention. This meant ridding society of what Reich
considered its most repressive institutions: compulsive
marriage and the patriarchal family. Compulsive marriage
refers to the traditional social demands that sexual
relationships be limited to marriage and that marriage
should be honored and maintained for the entire life of the
partners. At the heart of these two institutions lay a
repressive sexual morality.
84
Reich’s emphasis on revolutionary institutional changes
reflected his rejection of the conservative tendency of
psychology and his interest in Marxist social philosophy. A
distinction had to be made between reactionary psy-
chology and social psychology. His example of this
distinction involved the type of questions that might be
raised about individuals who steal when they are hungry or
go on strike when they are exploited. Reactionary psy-
chology, Reich argued, would try “to explain the theft and
the strike in terms of supposed irrational motives; reaction-
ary rationalizations are invariably the result.” On the other
hand, social psychology would not feel it necessary to
explain why some people steal when hungry or strike when
exploited but would try to explain “why the majority of
those who are hungry don’t steal and why the majority of
those exploited don’t strike.” 5
The questions raised by social psychology, Reich felt,
provided the missing ingredient in Marxist social philos-
ophy. The scientific sociology of Marx did not have the
tools to explain why all exploited workers did not strike.
The rationale and techniques of exploitation could be
explained by Marxism, but the workers’ acceptance of
exploitation could not be. Social-economic reasoning
could not explain thoughts and actions which were
inconsistent with economic interests and situations. Reich
believed that Marx would not have been able to explain
why a majority of German workers supported the rise of
fascism. What was lacking in the freedom movements in
Germany, Reich argued, “was a comprehension of ir-
rational, seemingly purposeless actions or, to put it
another way, of the cleavage between economy and
ideology.” What had to be realized was that it was not
only the case, as Marx stated, that “the ideas of the ruling
class are the ruling ideas” but that, as Reich stated, “every
social order produces in the masses of its members that
structure which it needs to achieve its main aims.” In the
case of fascism in Germany the supporting authoritarian
85
character structure of the masses was a product of the
repressive nature of the German family. 6
Reich’s goal was the elimination of cruelty and hostility
in people’s characters by bringing about major institutional
changes. Reich held that the individual had a character
armor which resulted in an inability to function sponta-
neously and naturally. This “armor” was a product of the
historical experience of the individual. “The whole expe-
riential world of the past was alive in the present in the
form of character attitudes. The make-up of a person is the
functional sum total of all his past experiences.” Individual
therapy was an attempt to break through these armored
layers of character. Reich found that this therapeutic
process revealed that the destructiveness in a person’s
character was nothing but anger “about frustration in
general and denial of sexual gratification in particular.”
Destructiveness in the individual character was in this case
a reaction to the inability to find pleasure. This inability to
find or experience pleasure resulted in pleasure anxiety
and character armor which both protected the individual
from pleasure and produced hostility to all pleasure-
producing experiences. Reich argued that pleasure anxiety
and character armor could explain why people were willing
to sacrifice their happiness to authoritarian institutions
and social customs. Character armor not only drives people
to a joyless life, but also makes them demand that others
conform to authoritarian structures. The central mech-
anism of pleasure was, of course, sexual. Reich argued that
as individuals encountered barriers to the satisfaction of
the sexual urge, they began to hate. If there were no social
outlets for expressing hatred, it became inhibited and
internalized. 7 The type of character produced by this
armoring was one most amenable to authoritarian or
fascist political organizations.
It was primarily sexual anxiety, and pleasure anxiety in
general, then, which inhibited the expression of both love
and hatred. The individual not only developed destructive
86
character traits, but was driven by anxiety to depend on
authority. In the 1920’s Reich realized, in what he himself
later regarded as one of his most important conclusions,
that “the orgastically unsatisfied individual develops an
insincere character and a fear of any behavior which he has
not thought out beforehand. . . .” 8 In other words, the
individual becomes incapable of spontaneous and natural
actions and seeks refuge in safe and dependent actions.
Because of pleasure anxiety about acting, people are driven
to seek security in an authoritarian structure which will
dictate their actions.
Reich’s utopian vision called for replacing this rigid
character structure with a self -regulating character, thereby
decreasing individual dependence on authoritarian struc-
tures. He noted that a breakdown in people’s character
armor brought about major changes in their social
customs, work and independence. Individuals who had
been highly moral suddenly found moralistic attitudes
alien and queer. Reich wrote, “. . . they might have
previously defended the principle of premarital chastity,
now they felt such a demand as grotesque.” Similar
reactions took place with regard to work style. Individuals
who had worked mechanically and viewed work as a
necessary evil began to seek jobs in which they were
interested. People whose jobs were already inherently
interesting became more absorbed in their work. Teachers
who had not been critical of present educational tech-
niques began to find the usual method of treating children
intolerable. The creation of a self -regulating character
often led to a complete breakdown of the work ethic.
Workers who had previously worked out of a compulsive
sense of duty found the work unbearable once they were
relieved of this compulsion. 9
In many ways Reich’s concept of self -regulated char-
acter is like Max Stimer’s concept of ownership of self.
For example, in contrasting moral regulation with self-
regulation Reich wrote that, “the individual with a moral
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character structure performs his work without inward
participation, as a result of the demands of a ‘Thou shalt’
which is alien to the ego.” 10 Moral regulation created an
armor which was not within the control of the individual.
In Stimer’s terms, it created moral duties which owned the
individual. Or, as Reich wrote,
The moralistic bureaucrat remains so even in bed. The
healthy character type, on the other hand, is able to
close up in one place and open up in another. He is in
command of his armor, because it does not have to
keep back forbidden impulses. 1 1
For Reich a person with a self-regulated character was
free of all hostility and conducted his or her life on the
basis of desire and pleasure. Established moral codes were
replaced with individual regulation. Reich, unlike Freud,
did not believe this would lead to chaos. On the contrary,
he saw people as being social and loving by nature. For
example, women who were trapped in compulsive marriage
and only performed the sexual act out of marital duty,
lived a life of constant frustration. But free of compulsive
marriage and pleasure anxiety, Reich argued, men and
women would usually seek one mate who loved and
satisfied them. This new kind of morality was to be
governed by genital satisfaction and desire. “An unsatis-
factory act was abstained from not because of fear, but
because it failed to provide sexual happiness.” 1 2
It is important to realize that for Reich one of the most
important elements in the sexual act was making the
partner happy; this was one of the foundations of a
satisfactory sexual experience. It was also the foundation
of a non-repressive, non-authoritarian society. Self-
regulation implied the ability to seek pleasure by trying to
give someone else pleasure. The self-regulated character
was one who was free of hostility, who owned himself or
herself, who quested for pleasure and whose quest for
pleasure meant giving happiness to others.
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For Reich the heart of the sexuality problem was the
compulsory monogamous marriage. In a study of anthro-
pological literature written in 1931, Reich argued that the
historical development of the patriarchial family and
monogamous marriage paralleled the transition from a
primeval economic work-democracy to the capitalist state.
The concentration of wealth within one stratum of society
resulted from the economic institution of marriage: in
order to keep wealth within the family from generation to
generation, the sexual activity of the female had to be
restricted before and after marriage. Reich quoted from
Engels’ The Origin of the Family, “The first class-conflict
that appears in history coincides with the development of
the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous
marriage and the first class-suppression with that of the
female sex by the male sex. . . .”* 3
The economic function of the family gave way to an
ideological function with the rise of the national state and
industrialism. The family became the primary educational
institution for training the child for an authoritarian
society. Reich referred to the modem family as a “factory
for authoritarian ideologies and conservative struc-
tures.” 14 It was both the structure of the family and its
repression of sexuality that prepared the child for the
state. In the middle-class home, Reich argued, the father
functioned within the family as the representative of the
authority of the state.
The educational function of the family, too, was
directly aimed at its own perpetuation. Children were
sexually inhibited in preparation for future marriage.
During the crucial ages of four to six they were usually
denied the opportunity for sexual play and their attempts
at masturbation were frustrated and condemned by their
parents. Reich recognized certain class differences with
regard to the treatment of children. In general, middle-
class children were more inhibited than working-class
children. This did not mean that working-class families
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were sexual paradises. On the contrary, many problems
arose because of crowded housing and because of identifi-
cation with the middle class.
An added problem for children within the family
structure was that they became targets for the hostility
and cruelty which resulted from their parents’ own sexual
repression. For parents, and especially mothers, children
became the only content of their lives— to the great
disadvantage of the children. Children came to “play the
role of household pets whom one can love but also
torture. . . ,” 1 5 Children within the family structure were
often objects of sadistic love, leading to the development
of even more hostility within their own characters. With
the family playing a major role in the education of the
child, this relationship of hostility came to be perpetuated
from one generation to another.
This combination of sadistic love, authoritarian struc-
ture, and sexual repression made the family the most
important institution for political education. On the one
hand, its function was to reproduce itself by “crippling
people sexually.” On the other hand, “[The family]
creates the individual who is forever afraid of life and of
authority and thus creates again and again the possibility
that masses of people can be governed by a handful of
powerful individuals.” 1 6 It was not accidental, Reich
contended, that conservative and reactionary youths were
strongly attached to their families while revolutionary
youth tended to reject their families.
It was in the Mass Psychology of Fascism, published in
1933, that Reich made his most brilliant statement of the
relationship between compulsory sexual morality, the
family, and the authoritarian state. The central question in
his study of fascism was why people supported a party
whose leadership was opposed to the interests of the
working masses. In approaching this problem he made
important distinctions between elements in each social
class which supported Hitler’s authoritarian dictatorship.
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Small farmers, bureaucrats and the middle class, while
different in terms of economic situation, shared the same
family situation— the very situation which, as Reich had
previously argued, produced the authoritarian personality.
This family situation also promoted nationalism and
militarism. The emotional core of ideas like homeland and
nation, he argued, were the ideas of mother and family.
The working class, however, had at one time displayed a
somewhat looser family arrangement and thus had not
been oriented so much toward nationalism as toward an
international workers’ movement. In the middle class, on
the other hand, the family indeed was a nation in
miniature and the mother was the homeland of the child.
Reich quoted the Nazi Goebbels: “Never forget that your
country is the mother of your life.” On Mother’s Day the
Nazi press declared, “She— the German mother— is the sole
bearer of the idea of the German nation. The idea of
‘Mother’ is inseparable from the idea of being German.” As
for militarism, Reich argued that it represented a substi-
tute gratification for sexuality :
The sexual effect of a uniform, the erotically provoc-
ative effect of rhythmically executed goose-stepping,
the exhibitionistic nature of militaristic procedures,
have been more practically comprehended by a
salesgirl or an average secretary than by our most
erudite politicians.
The forces of political reaction recognized this appeal,
designing flashy uniforms and displaying recruiting posters
which emphasized “foreign adventure” with the under-
lying implication of sexual freedom. 1 7
Working-class support of fascism, Reich believed, owed
its origin to working-class identification with the character
structure of the middle class. During the tremendous
period of physical and economic exploitation of the
nineteenth century, the proletariat maintained a character
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structure rooted in the working class. In that period
workers tended to identify with their own class; they were
conscious of themselves as workers. But by the twentieth
century, workers had alleviated their material condition—
they had won shorter working hours, social security, and
improved income. But rather than solidifying the workers’
movement, this led to worker identification with the
middle class. It was the purchase of the
lower middle class bedroom suite, the learning of
proper dance steps, the purchase of a “decent” suit of
clothes and the attempt to appear respectable by
suppressing sexuality that turned the revolutionary
and communist into the reactionary.
All of these banalities of life, Reich argued, had a “greater
reactionary influence when repeated day after day than
thousands of revolutionary rallies and leaflets can ever
hope to counterbalance.” When the Depression destroyed
the middle-class world, the working class, which had
depended upon the middle class, turned to fascism. As
Reich stated, “In times of prosperity this adaptation to
middle-class habits was intensified, but the subsequent
effect of this adaptation, in time of economic crisis, was to
obstruct the full unfolding of revolutionary senti-
ments.” 1 8
Reich’s analysis of working-class support of fascism
corresponds very closely to Freire’s warning of how the
oppressed identify with the oppressor; of how the
internalization of an alien consciousness comes to dom-
inate the people in the subordinate classes. For Reich
working-class identification with the middle class resulted
in a culture that was more stalwartly middle class than the
middle class itself. In a search for “respectability” the
working-class family became highly oppressive and authori-
tarian. In a sense this happens to every apparently
upwardly mobile group. For example, one could argue that
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the blue-collar worker in the United States has followed
this path in an attempt to display middle-class respecta-
bility. It is certainly possible that black people in the
United States, in an attempt to gain access to the
dominant culture will adopt the oppressive qualities of
white middle-class respectability, impose harsh moral
codes on their children, and attempt to do everything
“correctly.”
Reich believed that the Nazi Party was well aware that
its support was grounded in the family and sexual
repression. Mass individuals came to depend upon the
Fiihrer in the same manner as they had depended upon
their fathers. The German fascist gave strong support to
the idea of the family as the backbone of the nation and
attempted to assure that the sexual act was associated only
with reproduction in the national interest and not with
pleasurable gratification. Reich quoted Adolf Hitler’s 1932
presidential election statement that a woman’s ultimate
aim should be the creation of a family: “It is the smallest
but most valuable unit in the complete structure of the
state,” Hitler stated. “Work honors both man and woman.
But the child exalts the woman.” 1 9
In 1928 Wilhelm Reich founded the Socialist Society
for Sexual Advice and Study in Vienna as an attempt to
begin a major sexual revolution. Writing about this venture
later in his life, he reflected upon the revolutionary
implications of sexual freedom. Important social and
economic changes would have to be made to solve the
problems of adequate housing for adolescent sexual
activity and for economic independence from the family.
The sexual revolution also implies
criticism of all political tendencies which based their
existence and activity on man’s essential helplessness;
basic inner self-sufficiency of the human being; . . .
self-guidance in children’s education and in this way
the gradual attainment of self-sufficiency for grown-
ups. 2 0
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In 1930 Reich left Vienna and went to Germany
because of what he felt were negative pressures placed on
his social hygiene work. In Germany the Communist Party
agreed to organize an association on the basis of Reich’s
ideas. This organization, the German Association for
Proletarian Sexual Politics, issued a platform which con-
tained the basic elements of Reich’s plan. The program
called for better housing conditions, the abolition of laws
against homosexuality and abortion, the changing of
divorce and marriage laws, the issuance of free contra-
ceptives and birth-control advice, health protection of
mothers and children, abolition of laws prohibiting sex
education, and home leave for prisoners. Reich traveled
throughout Germany giving lectures and establishing sex
hygiene centers. Under pressure from the Nazis, Reich was
forced to flee Germany for Copenhagen in 1933.
The year he left Vienna for Germany, Reich published
his first major statement on sexual education, The Sexual
Revolution. This book was written in reaction to what
Reich labeled conservative sexual education and to what
he perceived as the failure of the Russian revolution.
Conservative sexual education, Reich believed, was
attempting to remove the mystery from sexual relation-
ships, and at the same time maintain traditional moral
ideas. Venereal disease was stressed in most sex education
courses in order to inhibit free sexual activity. Children
were told about the beauty of the human body and the
sexual act, but were advised to reserve sexual activity for
the confines of marriage. For Reich there could be no such
compromise between sexual education and established
morality. It had to be a vehicle for sexual freedom and
self -regulation.
Reich traced the development of sex and marriage laws
in the Soviet Union from the radical policies of the early
revolutionary period to the authoritarian policies of the
late 1920 s and 1930’s, which he termed “Red Fascism.”
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This regression involved the attempt to re-establish the
family as the center of education and authority. “In our
fight for self-government of the children and for the
elimination of the authoritarian form of the schools, we
can no longer point to the S.U. [Soviet Union].” He
argued that the rise of a totalitarian state, the end of
sexual liberation, the re-establishment of the family as the
center of the state, and the end of experimental and free
education were all part of the same phenomenon. 2 1
Reich noted that as early as December 1917, Lenin had
decreed that the husband was to lose his power of
domination over the family and that women were to be
given economic and sexual freedom and the right to
determine their own names, residences, and citizenship.
Marriage was made a purely secular occasion— the power of
the church was removed. The family structure was further
weakened by the institution of liberal divorce laws so that
marriages could be dissolved by mutual consent. The
education of children was to become a collective enter-
prise.
One of the schools that impressed Reich most during a
visit to the Soviet Union in the late 1920’s was Vera
Schmidt’s psychoanalytical home for children in Moscow.
The school, founded in 1921, was what Reich referred to
as “the first attempt in the history of education to give the
theory of infantile sexuality a practical content.” This
school emphasized the development of self-regulation
within the context of a community of children. Social
adjustment would not be a product of moralistic judg-
ment— which could not be understood by the child and
only served the interests of the adult— but of the real social
life of the children. Teachers at Vera Schmidt’s school
withheld all praise, blame, and judgments about the
children’s behavior. No violent displays of affection, such
as embracing and kissing the child, were allowed, for they
were only a means for adults to live out their own
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unsatisfied sexuality. Without disciplinary measures and
moralistic judgment there would be no need for “patching
up with kisses the harm one has done with beatings .” 2 2
Reich heartily approved of letting children work out
their own social adjustment within a community of their
peers. This removed them from the power of the family,
which taught the child to follow authoritarian father and
mother figures. Within the community of children the
individual learned instead to act on the basis of self -need
and self-regulation. Reich found support for these ideas in
his study of anthropology. Among the Trobriand Islanders,
who were one of Reich’s fondest examples of a non-
repressive sexual culture, children were given a great deal
of freedom and independence from parental authority.
Although parents would scold or coax their children, they
would never issue a command to them nor speak to them
other than as equals. One of the important results of this
freedom was the ability of the children to form their own
independent community. Children of Trobriand Islanders
either remained with their parents during the day or joined
their friends in a miniature republic. This community
within the community functioned according to its own
needs and desires. It provided both a vehicle for sociali-
zation which was free from authority, and a means of
collective opposition to the parents . 2 3
The most important element of self-regulation among
the Trobriand Islanders and the children at Vera Schmidt’s
school was sexual self -regulation. At the psychoanalytical
home no moral judgments were made with regard to sexual
activities and children were taught to treat them like any
other bodily function. Children were absolutely free to
satisfy their sexual curiosity among themselves, mutually
inspecting each other and viewing each other’s naked
bodies. This self-regulation of the sexual drives avoided the
sexual anxiety and general pleasure anxiety which, led to
the development of an armored and authoritarian indi-
vidual who could neither give nor receive pleasure . 2 4
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Freedom and community of the type found in the
psychoanalytical home was essential for any meaningful,
positive social change. Reich wrote, “The history of the
formation of ideologies shows that every social system,
consciously or unconsciously, makes use of the influencing
of children in order to anchor itself in the human
structure .” 2 5 The method of sexual education, for in-
stance, was directly related to the functioning of the
economic enterprise. Self -regulated sexuality led to volun-
tary, free-flowing productive work; instinctual suppression
led to work done as duty. It was in the context of this
discussion of sexual and social self-regulation that Reich
raised the traditional radical dilemma of whether the child
should be indoctrinated into revolutionary beliefs.
The question was formulated in terms of how a
self-governing and non-authoritarian society reproduced
itself in its children. There were two possible methods of
dealing with the problem. One was to indoctrinate with
“revolutionary instead of patriarchal ideals.” The other
method was to give up the idea of revolutionary indoctri-
nation and concentrate upon forming “the structure of the
child in such a manner that it reacts of itself collectively
and accepts the general revolutionary atmosphere without
rebellion .” 2 6 Reich, of course, argued for the latter
because the real meaning of an ideology is determined by
the character structure of the individual. A radical social
philosophy could end in totalitarianism if preached and
practiced by authoritarian personalities. The most im-
portant step for a self-governing society was to assure that
it was free of authoritarian character traits.
In the last chapter of The Sexual Revolution Reich
outlined the steps that should be taken to provide social
and legal protection for infantile and adolescent sexuality.
He called for the establishment of model institutions of
collective education which would be the nuclei of the new
social order. These institutions would function in a manner
similar to Vera Schmidt’s school, with scientific research
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being conducted to modify and improve techniques. Reich
called for the distribution of birth-control devices on a
mass scale. He also argued that, “A repetition of the
catastrophic failure of the Soviet sexual revolution is
unavoidable unless the room problem for adolescents and
unmarried people is solved.” This, Reich argued, could be
accomplished by the government establishing emergency
homes for youth. The population would have to be
convinced that the government was uncompromisingly
committed to ensuring the sexual happiness of all people.
In addition to these changes Reich called for an extensive
network of sexological institutions which would bring
sexual instruction and enlightened discussions to the
masses of the people. Children and adolescents should be
protected against the implanting of sexual anxiety and
sexual guilt feelings.
The ideal society of self-regulated character structures
was called a work-democracy by Reich. In this society
people would rid themselves of dependency upon political
structures; rather, the formation of social organizations
would flow directly out of necessary work activity. For
Reich politics and political parties were irrational mecha-
nisms for the enhancement of personal power and the
promotion of dependency. The social irrationalism of
politics was evidenced by the fact that society gave
politicians great power to exercise judgments in areas
where they were without competency. The power of the
politician was analogous to that of the mystic. “A
politician,” he wrote, “is in a position to deceive millions
of people, e.g., he can promise to establish freedom
without actually having to do so. No one demands proof
of his competence or of the feasibility of his promises.”
Politics in this sense functioned like religion and in fact
represented a substitute for it. A mystic, like a politician,
“can imbue masses of people with the belief that there is a
life after death— and he need not offer the least trace of
proof.” 2 7
In a self-regulated work-democracy the irrationalism of
politics would be replaced with organizations growing out
of the work situation. No government or political structure
would be required to organize a system of railroads or
conduct a postal system; these organizations would grow
directly out of the social needs of transportation and mail
delivery. People with self -regulated character structures
would not submit to the authority of irrational politics
and would demand social organizations which both served
a need and provided a rational means of getting a
particular task accomplished.
This dream, of course, was similar to the dream of
traditional anarchism— the end of politics and the return of
power to the people. Reich’s important contribution to
this debate was to highlight the importance of the
relationship between personality and social structure. This
brings us another step beyond Stimer’s call for ownership
of self and Freire’s concern for an experiential awareness
of social reality. In essence he was saying that an
atmosphere of freedom helped to create a personality
which demanded still more freedom. In the same manner,
the ability to give love and pleasure depended upon the
ability to experience love and pleasure. Repression of any
sort decreased not only people’s own pleasure but their
ability to give love and make others happy. For Reich
there could not be any compromise on this issue. If one
wanted a society of self-regulated and non-sadistic in-
dividuals, one had to raise children in an atmosphere free
from moral repression, authoritarian control, and pleasure
anxiety.
IN THE LATE 1940’s Reich wrote The Murder of Christ.
Reich’s description of Christ was his most poetic statement
of the traits of a self-regulated, free, loving and sponta-
neous character. It was the “armored man (sic)” who killed
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Christ and transformed his message into a religion of
mysticism and repression. Christ spoke very plainly; his
message gained mystery only because those armored
individuals could not understand him. Christ must have
recognized this fact when he quoted Isaiah :
You shall indeed hear but never understand and you
shall indeed see but never perceive. For this peoples’
heart has grown dull, and their ears are heavy of
hearing, and their eyes they have closed, lest they
should perceive with their eyes, and hear with their
ears, and understand with their heart, and turn for me
to heal them.
(Matthew 13:14, 15)
Reich wrote, “This is the ARMOR: No, they do not hear
nor see nor feel with their hearts what they see and hear
and perceive.”
Christ was the symbol of the ability to love and give
pleasure without robbing the world of joy. He was able to
move with the currents of life and make his own life a pure
statement of love. “The expression of Christ,” Reich
wrote, “has the quality of a meadow on an early sunlit
spring morning. You can’t see it, but you feel it all through
you if you are not plague ridden.” It was the armored
individual, the “Red Fascist” and the person of “petit-
bourgeois sentimentality,” who could not feel that radi-
ance. The world of work-democracy and genital freedom
was to be populated with people who acted in the manner
of Christ. Christ
can laugh and scream with joy. He knows no restraint
in his expression of love; in giving himself to fellow
men, he does not lose a grain of natural dignity. When
he walks on the ground, his feet set fully into the soil
as if to take root with each step, separating again to
take root again. 2 8
A.S. NEILL HAD FORMULATED and practiced his ideas
on education many years before his encounter with Reich
in 1937. Over the years of friendship following their first
meeting, Reich provided a psychological argument which
pulled together many of Neill’s ideas and influenced the
self-regulative character of the education offered at Sum-
merhill, Neill’s school. Summerhill became the symbol for
free school movements throughout the twentieth century—
certainly it had a strong impact on the development of the
free school movement in the United States in the 1960’s.
"Free school” eventually came to mean a school aimed at
developing the self-regulative character structure in people.
Before meeting Reich, Neill claimed to have been
influenced by a wide variety of people, including Adler,
Freud, and Homer Lane. He admitted that he did not
study psychology in any concentrated manner but just
brought together those psychological arguments which
made sense to him. His early philosophy was a blend of
practical experience and popularized Freudian psychology.
In the 1920’s his dream was to spread the free school idea
throughout the world; he even wrote Henry Ford to
suggest that his factory might produce school caravans. In
the 1930’s Neill began to gain a critical understanding of
the economics of capitalist society. It was this combina-
tion of Freud and radical political and economic analysis
which made Summerhill an important institution of radical
education in the twentieth century.
In establishing and operating Summerhill, Neill wanted
to provide a means by which the world could be saved
from crime, despair, and unhappiness. His early work must
be understood in the context of the sense of failure and
disillusionment that swept Europe after World War I. “Our
education, politics and economics led to the Great War”;
he wrote in the 1920’s; “our medicine has not done away
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with disease; our religion has not abolished usury and
robbery. . . The source of the world’s problems, and the
major problem with the education of children, was the
repression of natural drives. Neill plainly stated in The
Problem Child, “I believe that it is moral instruction that
makes the child bad. I find that when I smash the moral
instruction a bad boy has received he automatically
becomes a good boy.” 2 9
People, according to Neill, often found themselves in a
state of conflict between the “life force” which is part of
their nature, and the self which is created by moral
instruction. Every action must be seen in terms of the
tension between these two components. Moral instruction,
then, tended to produce its opposite. A mother who
suppressed a child’s selfishness, for example, was ensuring
that the child would be selfish. A person who stole was
acting in a way which could be linked to repressive moral
teaching in childhood. In Neill’s identification of the
existence of moral authority and conscience as the source
of civilization’s problems, he was following the tradition of
anarchists like Max Stimer. In an imaginary dialogue with
a “Mrs. Morality,” he told this symbolic figure of
authority that, “I believe there would be more honesty in
the world if policemen were abolished. ... It is the law
that makes the crime.” 3 0
While at Reich’s Institute in Maine during the late
1940’s, Neill began to rewrite and condense his earlier
works, claiming that, “I sat down to read them, and
realized with something akin to horror, that they were
out-of-date.” 31 The weaving of these early ideas into
Reichian thought did not prove difficult. The concept that
morality produces hostility, aggression, and unhappiness
received added support from Reich’s concepts of character
armor and pleasure anxiety. The one point, of course,
upon which they immediately agreed was that a world free
of hostility and aggression depended on total freedom for
the child. Neill claimed Reich often chided him for not
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going far enough and encouraging adolescent sexual
relations at Summerhill. “I told him,” Neill wrote, “that to
allow a full sex life to adolescents would mean the end of
my school if and when the government heard about it.” 32
The one idea that Neill did not alter was the distinction
between freedom and license in a free school. Freedom
meant freedom from moral teachings, not the right to
commit any action. In response to the question of what he
would do if a boy were pounding nails into a grand piano,
he said, “It doesn’t matter if you take the child away from
the piano so long as you don’t give the child a conscience
about hammering nails.” In other words, he argued that
one can stop a person from doing something without
making it a form of moral punishment. Another example
Neill gave was of a child leaving a tool out in the rain. In
this case the rain was harmful to the object but not
morally good or bad in an abstract sense. To provide
freedom for the child meant to provide him or her with
the opportunity of growing up without an internalized
moral authority or conscience. 3 3
Neill’s concept of freedom was very close to Stimer’s
idea of ownership of self. Neill wrote, “To give a child
freedom is not easy. It means that we refuse to teach him
religion or politics or class-consciousness.” Freedom was
the right to own or choose one’s own ideals and beliefs;
the function of a free school was to provide the necessary
institutionalization of this concept. Summerhill reflected
Neill’s statement of the 1920’s, “No man is good enough
to give another his own ideals.” 34 It was to be a place
where the individual could explore and make choices
about those ideals.
By the 1930’s Neill had begun to link his educational
ideas with radical political thought. For instance, in 1935 a
magazine presented Neill and two other headmasters in
England with a series of questions dealing with obedience
and authority in the educational process. They were asked
to what extent they thought the free development of the
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individual clashed with the interests of the state, and
whether the desire for freedom could be combined with a
sense of responsibility. The two school officials replied in
general liberal terms about the school promoting coopera-
tion and a sense of responsibility toward the state. Neill
answered with a statement that the state at that time
represented a capitalist system which emphasized the
instinct of possession over that of creation. Within a
capitalist state, he argued, “. . . there is no hope of creative
love as opposed to possessive love. Only under some form
of Socialism have freedom and love and education a
chance.” For Neill the answer to the question depended on
the nature of the state. If the state were capitalistic and
authoritarian, then the free development of the individual
would clash with its interests. On the other hand, “The
free development of the individual will not clash with the
interests of the State if the latter is just and humane and
loving.” 3 5
In 1939 Neill wrote The Problem Teacher, a book which
detailed the relationships he was beginning to see between
the nature of schooling and political and economic
systems. In it he stated bluntly that, “The State schools
must produce a slave mentality because only a slave
mentality can keep the system from being scrapped.” He
suggested that there was a direct link between Hitler’s
method of control and an educational system which
produced humble yesmen. In general his argument fol-
lowed the pattern of the traditional radical critique of
schooling as a function of the interests of the state. In
Germany and Italy national schooling meant fascism; in
England it meant preparing each generation to fit into a
capitalist economy. The English schools not only produced
a slave mentality but also robbed the working class of
effective leadership— a point which must be considered one
of the most important criticisms of the development of the
secondary school in both England and the United States.
“The master stroke in . . . educational policy,” he wrote,
was the secondary school, the school that took
children of the working class to white-collar jobs in
clerking, teaching, doctoring and the other profes-
sions. Thus it robbed the workers of its best men and
women. . . , 3 6
Neill’s critique of schooling was now beginning to
reflect some of the influence of his recent contacts with
Reich. The home, he argued, was the state in miniature,
and it was because it provided this training in obedience
that every state gave so much emphasis to the home. But
Neill took Reich’s argument one important step further.
He insisted that the power of the school was based on its
reproduction of family life. “Theoretically one would
think that schooling is an antidote to family influence. It
isn’t: it is family life on promotion.” Neill went on to
draw parallels between the father as head of a family and
the teacher as head of a family of forty or more children.
In fact, the situation within the school might be worse
than that in the family, because the teacher did not
necessarily have the love most fathers felt for their
children. Within the school the hostile side of the father
was emphasized through the teacher. “And this is true of
the disciplinarian,” Neill wrote, “for he has no love to give
out, only hate.” 3 7
This attack on the family and established schools did
not imply abolition of those institutions, but their
modification through the spread of Summerhill-type
schools. Writing in 1944, he expressed hope that a socialist
state could be established and with it, a national system of
boarding schools. “Naturally,” he wrote, “I want to
specify that such a school will be a free school, with
self-government and self-determination of the individual
child, that is, I visualize a nation of Summerhills.” The
spread of such schools would not eliminate the family but
provide a means for the child to escape the narrow
confines of the nuclear family. The small family, Neill
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105
argued, was not good enough for the child. It was not only
authoritarian but repressive in terms of its lack of a broad
community of contacts. In schools like Summerhill, the
child would not only be free of the authority of the family
but would also be in the stimulating company of a wide
variety of self-governing people. Neill sadly recognized that
most people would not agree with his ideas: “Most people
believe in discipline (for others); most think that a child
should be treated like a fruit tree and pruned regularly.” 3 8
It should be emphasized that Neill, throughout the
existence of Summerhill, firmly held that freedom alone
was the only cure for most “problem children.” But like
Reich, Neill was concerned about how mass therapy could
be conducted. By the 1940’s he had come to the
conclusion that analysis was not a necessary therapeutic
technique. The mere practice of freedom was the thera-
peutic tool. Any person could help problem children
provided that person understood and believed in freedom.
Like Reich, Neill came to believe that radical therapy did
not involve the treatment of individual patients but the
removal of those social conditions which caused repres-
sion.
It was from this standpoint of radical therapy that Neill
criticized the general trend of Freudianism. The failure of
most Freudians, he argued, was their unwillingness to link
themselves with some social movement. “Psycho-analysis
has linked up with nothing. It knows that the father
complex is evil, yet it does not begin a campaign to abolish
fear and authority in the school.” 39 Neill admitted that
without Freud, Summerhill would not exist. But what
Summerhill had accomplished, and where most of the
psychoanalytic movement had failed, was in bridging the
gap between theory and actual social organization. Sum-
merhill was an attempt to establish an institution to rid
society of the problems defined by Freudian theorists. In
this sense, Summerhill represented radical social therapy.
106
IN 1947 NEILL MADE his first trip to the United States,
where he stayed with Reich at his Institute in Maine.
During his stay Neill wrote The Problem Family. In this
book he argued that socialism was not sufficient to ensure
the happiness and freedom of humanity. He echoed
Reich’s ideas when he wrote, “I want Socialism plus
sex-economy, nationalization plus relaxed bodies, for if
the body is relaxed the chances are that the psyche is
pretty free.” 40 Neill rejected his previous leanings toward
established socialist and communist movements; he also
rejected solutions based on politics and political democ-
racies. What he accepted was a Reichian work-democracy
where self -regulated individuals would reject the irrational-
ism of politics and form social organizations out of need
and desire. The free life of Summerhill was now the
prototype of the work-democracy.
In The Problem Family Neill reiterated his own idea—
and Reich’s— that the heart of civilization’s problems was
the organization of the family. Again he linked the
organization of the family to that of the state and the
school. Neill now defined schools as products of direct
class interest, used
to discipline the workers in such a way that they are
symbolically castrated for life, the aim being to
continue the privileges of the rich, who will be safe
with an under class that has been unmanned and
therefore has not the guts to rebel. 4 1
The problem for modem society was to choose between
the free and unfree family.
The free family was one in which children were freed
from the internalized authority produced by moral dis-
cipline. This could be done within the family. “In families
107
many parents do it,” Neill wrote, “and there are quite a lot
of children living today who will never spank a child or
moralize about sex or give a fear of God .” 42 Freedom
within the family would then be reflected in the school
and in society in general. Freedom within the family, for
example, implied the abolition of compulsive marriage.
Marriage would be held together only by the love of the
two partners. The free family, Summerhill and work-
democracy were all interrelated parts.
For both Reich and Neill education and upbringing were
directed toward encouraging the growth of free, self-
regulated individuals. They did not use the word “free-
dom” in the liberal sense of freedom before the law or
political freedom, but in the Stimerian sense of ownership
of self. One was truly free of authority when one was free
of guilt. Reich and Neill added a new dimension to
libertarian education by grounding the problem of free-
dom in the actual psychic growth of the child.
0
108
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FREEING THE CHILD
FROM CHILDHOOD
WHILE WILHELM REICH and A.S. Neill considered
liberation of the child from the moral confines of the
nuclear family, they did not consider liberating the child
from the very concept of childhood. In their solutions the
process of child rearing would simply be transferred from
the nuclear family to a community of children. This meant
perpetuating a period of childhood and youth during
which children would be kept in a state of dependency,
isolated from the major social and economic forces of
society. Neill in a sense was trapped by modem concepts
of childhood and youth into assuming that abolition of
control by the nuclear family required the substitution of
another controlling institution. The solution he found in
Summerhill left unanswered the questions of whether
collective child-rearing practices might not be as harmful
or more harmful than the nuclear family and whether the
problem of the nuclear family might not be solved only by
111
breaking through the confines of the modem concepts of
childhood and youth. Perhaps any meaningful concept of
freedom must include the actions and activities of
children.
One way of approaching the problem of the relationship
of the child and the family is to consider it in terms of
historically changing concepts of childhood and adoles-
cence. One of the important historical arguments that has
been given for liberating the child from the nuclear family
and the modem concept of childhood can be found in
Philippe Aries’ modem classic, Centuries of Childhood.
Tracing the interrelated development of the concepts of
childhood, family, and the school, he argues that the
concept of childhood is a very recent one in Western
culture. During the Middle Ages, as soon as an infant left
swaddling clothes she or he was integrated into the adult
world and shared the same games, social life, and styles of
clothing. Children were not segregated, nor were they
defined as a special category. Similarly, the family at this
time did not exist as a small nuclear unit. Marriage was not
given much significance and was primarily an economic
institution for passing on the family name and wealth. Of
much greater importance was the community, which
provided the major focus of social activity and was the
major agency of socialization. It was this community,
consisting of people of all ages, into which the child was
integrated.
After the Middle Ages the concept of the child, the
importance of the small nuclear family, and the role of the
school all developed along parallel lines and reinforced
each other. The school helped to mark off the special age
periods of childhood development and taught the family
that it must direct special attention to the well-being of
the child. The child was withdrawn from the adult
community and given a special status which included
different expectations and a separate social life. The family
began to define itself as a small, detached, nuclear unit.
112
f
Aries concludes with,
Our world is obsessed by the physical, moral and
sexual problems of childhood. . . . Family and school
together removed the child from adult society. . . .
The solicitude of family. Church, moralists and
administrator deprived the child of the freedom he
had hitherto enjoyed among adults.
Prior to the modem family, an individual’s social relation-
ships were mainly within a broad community and this
created a greater degree of sociability. Conversely, Aries
links the modem trend toward individualism with the
development of the small modern family, going so far as to
state: “One is tempted to conclude that sociability and the
concept of the family were incompatible, and develop only
at each other’s expense .” 1
What Aries’ study suggests is that if we truly want to
change this type of family structure, we must get rid of the
concept of childhood and the idea that there should be
institutions which attempt to make the child into some
particular moral or social ideal. This would mean the
elimination of the school. In its place we would see the
development of the child as an independent being and his
or her integration within the social structure.
Recent studies of the development of the concept of
adolescence and youth culture have tended to support
these interrelationships found between the family, school,
and specifically defined age categories. These studies also
take up an aspect of the problem that Aries did not fully
consider— one that has important implications for any
future planning— the effect of industrial organization on
changing concepts of childhood and youth. Concepts of
childhood and youth, these studies show, can be directly
related to the changing value of these age groups in the
industrial process. In the nineteenth century children of
the lower classes were an important element in the labor
113
supply for factories in developing industrial countries like the
United States and England. Children of the lower class were
without childhood in the sense that at an early age they
entered the industrial workplace. Middle-class children, on
the other hand, were needed for a developing white-collar
class. This required special training in schools, which
meant they were withheld from the labor market and kept
in a state of dependency upon the family. 2
In the United States in the late nineteenth century a
combination of factors resulted in the displacement of
more and more children and adolescents from the labor
market. There was a feeling by industrialists that techno-
logical changes no longer required the use of children in
factories, a concern by labor unions that cheap child labor
depressed the wage scale, and an increase in the need for
white-collar workers. Beginning in the 1920’s, increases in
man-hour productivity were reflected in the displacement
of more youth from the labor force and an increase in high
school enrollments. Young people were simply not needed
in an economic system increasingly dependent on
machines.
One effect of these changes was the development of a
concept of adolescence with its own psychology and
cultural style. This was reflected in the development of
something called the “youth problem.” In the 1920’s “the
youth problem” was seen as part of the Jazz Age; in the
1930’s it was called the Lost Generation; after World War
II it took the form of the Beat movement; and in the
1960’s it was related to the Hippies and Yippies. 3
Another important consequence of these changes was
the extension of the child’s dependency on the family.
While most people think of the school as threatening the
nuclear family, in fact the opposite might be true. As
children and youth were removed from the labor market
and placed in school they became dependent on the family
for a longer and longer period. By the middle of the
century, in many families in the United States this
114
dependency extended until college years. The structure of
schooling required the maintenance of families as places
from which children were sent to school. Rather than the
school weakening the family structure by taking over some
of its functions, the family was probably strengthened by
the increased dependence of children and youth.
GIVEN THIS CONSIDERATION of the historical develop-
ment of the concept of childhood and dependency on the
nuclear family, the collective child-rearing practices of
Summerhill appear in a somewhat different light. First,
collective child-rearing practices certainly would weaken
the family in that the major responsibility for child rearing
would be transferred to a community like Summerhill. But
this might not have any effect on family organization if
the father and mother of the child were required to pay
for their child’s care until adolescence or later. The
situation would be similar to any other middle-class family
sending its children to boarding school. The family would
still be required as a legal and economic institution until
the child reached some socially defined stage of adulthood.
The school would therefore only be truly effective in
weakening the nuclear family if the mother and father
were freed from legal and economic responsibility for the
child while it was very young.
Second, collective child-rearing practices would have an
important effect on the social role of women. Freed from
extended periods of responsibility for child rearing,
women would be able to enter the labor market on more
equal terms with men. The liberation of women was an
important concern to Reich and Neill, and is one of the
major forces shaping the present development of collective
child-rearing practices like day-care centers. But again, this
only had meaning if the mother is freed from economic
and legal responsibility for the child.
115
Third, collective child-rearing practices do free the child
from the family but not from the state of dependency
inherent in the very concept of childhood: in this case,
dependency upon a community, school, or the state. This
situation carries with it a certain amount of irony.
According to Aries, the development of the concept of
childhood was a major force in the development of the
modem family. Collective child rearing attacks the family
without calling into question one of the important
elements which caused its existence.
From this perspective collective child rearing might be
of more benefit to the parents than to the child. One of
Reich’s and Neill’s hopes, of course, was that if children
were liberated from the moral structures of the family,
they would develop non-authoritarian character structures.
The important question is whether this would occur. If
collective child rearing were placed under government
control and directed toward the traditional aims of public
schooling, it seems unlikely that it would. These doubts
are confirmed by recent studies of the collective child-
rearing methods of the Israeli Kibbutz. The Kibbutz
represents an attempt to solve the problems of women’s
equality and the family through collective methods. It is a
good illustration of the inner dynamics of the problem and
it suggests that solutions based on collective child rearing
might result in the creation of a non-rebellious and totally
group-conformist type of personality.
The Kibbutz movement represents one of the most
important twentieth-century experiments in developing a
society that would provide equality for all its members. It
has established agricultural communities with collective
ownership of the tools of production and democratic
control. Within the Kibbutz movement there has been an
attempt to maintain economic and occupational equality.
Collective child-rearing methods have been developed and
the nuclear family has been de -emphasized, partly in order
to establish equality for women and free them from the
burden of child rearing.
116
The evolution of and interconnection between female
equality, changing family patterns, and collective child-
rearing practices in the Kibbutz received its earliest
consideration in the United States in the work of
anthropologist Melford E. Spiro in the early 1950’s. In
1951 he lived on a Kibbutz which traced its origins to the
early 1920’s. It had been founded primarily by Jewish
youth of Polish origin who, coming out of the youth
movements in Europe, combined a pastoral romanticism
with radical rejection of traditional Jewish customs. They
emphasized a rejection of city life for the hard work of an
agricultural community. They also sought to replace the
traditional Jewish family with a form of cooperative
living. 4
When the Kibbutz was founded, one of the main
concerns was the equality of women. The importance and
compulsiveness of marriage were reduced and the sexual
relationship was viewed as a personal affair, with neither
the original union nor its termination requiring the
sanction of the community. The marriage relationship was
announced essentially by a couple asking for a joint room,
and divorce by the couple asking for separate rooms. By
the 1950’s the Kibbutz had become part of the State of
Israel and the law required that a child had to be born of
married parents in order to receive civil rights; therefore,
official marriage on this Kibbutz occurred with pregnancy.
Reducing the importance of marriage, it was believed,
would reduce the social and economic dependency of the
woman on the man. The abolition of the marriage
ceremony was meant to remove women’s legal subjection
to men. The female did not assume the male’s name nor
was her legal status that of “his wife.” Within this Kibbutz
a female’s prestige was not enhanced by the fact that her
husband was a great worker or brilliant leader. Because of
the collective ownership of property the female was not
economically dependent on the male. The traditional
sexual division of labor was destroyed. Men and women
were to have similar occupational roles. Spiro found,
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1
however, that the ideal of women’s equality had been
compromised by what was referred to as women’s “biolog-
ical tragedy.”
Over the long years of development work had become
divided on the basis of sex. This was due partly to the
strenuous nature of some of the labor, but even more
significantly to the fact that pregnant women could not
work for long periods in the fields and nursing mothers
had to work near the Infant House. This meant that when
women were forced to leave vital agricultural pursuits,
their positions were assumed by men. Consequently, on
the Kibbutz where Spiro lived, 88 percent of the women
were involved in service jobs, the largest numbers working
in education and the laundry. 5
Hand in hand with this reduction in the importance of
marriage went a de-emphasis on the role of the family.
Certain traditional types of family functions were collec-
tivized. One important step was the establishment of a
common dining room. People were not to separate into
nuclear families at mealtime — an occasion which had
traditionally performed a unifying function for the family.
In fact, the traditional family meal represented all the
values the members of the Kibbutz wanted to reject: the
father sat as patriarchal leader of the family while the
female displayed her subservient role by serving the food.
In the collective dining room males and females shared the
cooking and cleaning. The meal itself became a community
affair rather than a family affair. In fact, the children ate
in their own separate dining facilities.
The emphasis on the family was also reduced with the
collective education of children. On this particular Kib-
butz, collective education began four days after birth,
when the baby and mother were released from the
hospital. At this age the child entered the “Children’s
Society” in which it remained until graduation from high
school and election into the Kibbutz. As the child grew up,
it lived in a series of “houses.” The Infant House handled a
maximum of sixteen infants ranging in age from four days
to approximately one year and was supervised by a nurse
and three assistants drawn from the labor supply of the
community. The infants were not allowed to be taken to
their parents’ rooms until they were six months old, so
that most personal needs were attended to by the nurses.
Infants were with their parents only during feeding time or
during parental visits to the Infant House on weekday
afternoons and Saturdays.
At the age of six months the children were allowed one
hour a day away from the Infant House to visit their
parents’ rooms; at one year this was increased to two hours
a day and the children were taken from the Infant House
to the Toddlers House. There they were placed under the
supervision of a new nurse, gradually toilet trained, and
taught to feed themselves. They learned to play with
children of the same age group. The size of the social
group in the Toddlers House was about eight children. At
the age of four or five years the children left this group
and entered Kindergarten. The size of the community of
children at this time was increased to sixteen. This
established the social group the child would be with until
the end of high school.
The children were therefore not raised in a family but in
a community of peers. They lived in a dormitory, visited
their parents for two hours a day, and shared all the rest of
the day with their peers. There was little differentiation by
sex in this process. Boys and girls shared the same showers,
toilets, and rooms. They were accustomed to sharing
activities and viewing each other’s bodies. Sexual matters
were discussed quite openly and were not hidden from the
children. However, sexual activity itself was discouraged
until the individual entered the Kibbutz. 6
The importance of the Kibbutz education was that it
consciously attempted to maintain female equality by
eliminating the importance of the nuclear family in child
rearing. It was hoped that female equality would be
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insured by a collective education which practiced sexual
equality and which abolished the social role of mother.
The question that must be raised about this process has
to do with the psychological effects of being raised in a
community of peers. What does such a form of child
rearing mean in terms of power and authority relationships
within a society? The psychological effects of child rearing
on the Kibbutz have been studied by a variety of experts . 7
Probably the most important writing on the relationship
between child-rearing practices and social structure has
been Bruno Bettelheim’s The Children of the Dream.
One of the important consequences of collective child
rearing, Bettelheim has argued, is the development of a
collective superego or collective conscience — what Max
Stimer had referred to as the “spook” of internalized
authority. Bettelheim recognizes that this development
within the Kibbutz had important implications for other
Western cultures. Within the Kibbutz, the source of the
superego is no longer the parents but the children’s
society. This is precisely the trend in other Western
societies like the United States, where the role of the
parent is decreasing and the importance of the peer group
increasing. “If this trend continues,” he writes, “the
superego in our society, too, may come to be based more
and more on a morality that derives from the need to
cooperate with the peer group, as is already true in the
kibbutz .” 8
For Bettelheim the superego which is the product of a
peer group is less awesome, more familiar, and more
inescapable. In the middle-class family the source of
authority is the parents, with support from other authority
figures like the police or God. In the Kibbutz the superego
is a product of collective demands and is less often
presented as a threat. On the Kibbutz the individual, as
part of the peer group, participates directly in the forming
of her or his own superego. Since the individual ego helps
to form the superego, there is less of a tendency toward
the separation of the two and the development of conflict.
There is also less guilt and anxiety, because to meet the
demands of the superego is to meet the demands of the
community. In other societies morality, particularly sexual
morality, makes demands that have no relationship to the
real life of the community, creating conflict for the
individual. With the collective superego, however, there is
less conflict because the demands of the collective super-
ego reflect the demands of the environment.
Bettelheim’s argument suggests that the abolition of the
nuclear family might have some very positive results in
terms of the reduction of individual emotional conflict. On
the other hand, it might result in even more powerful
forms of control. Middle-class children can remove them-
selves from their parents, hold them at a distance. But
Kibbutz children never escape the watchful eyes of their
peers; moreover, the individual on the Kibbutz is made a
part of the controlling system. “We can never hide from a
control system for which we are quite consciously a part,”
writes Bettelheim. For the Kibbutz child “the commands
are more inescapable because there is nowhere a dissenting
voice to support one’s own doubts or dissent .” 9
Being raised in a community of children also makes it
difficult to separate one’s own ego from that of the group.
In the Kibbutz little time or emphasis can be given to
private feelings and emotions; children can rarely be alone
and outside the control of the group. According to
Bettelheim, “Group sanctions are all the more effective
because with no way to escape the group, there is no way
to escape its rejection .” 1 0 If one does try to run counter
to the demands of the group, there are no supporting
values for this revolt, no place to escape the values of the
group. Growing up in a community of children provides
very few opportunities to experience oneself as being
separate from the group.
Children of the Kibbutz also exhibit an emotional
flatness and an inability to express deep emotional feelings
120
121
that Bettelheim links to the process of collective child
rearing. In the first place, group education allows very
little time or opportunity for the experiencing of private
emotion or an emotion shared intimately by only one or
two friends. Again, one finds no support for the private
experience. Bettelheim suggests that in the Kibbutz,
Emotion shared with only one other person is a sign
of selfishness no less than other private possessions.
Nowhere more than in the kibbutz did I realize the
degree to which private property, in the deep layers
of the mind, relates to private emotions . 1 1
Second, group life often requires the repression of strong
emotional feelings. This is particularly true during adoles-
cence, when sexual relations on the Kibbutz are not
sanctioned but at the same time adolescent girls and boys
are sharing rooms, toilets, and showers. This condition
promotes a high degree of sexual stimulation yet at the
same time requires the repression of that drive. Third,
Bettelheim suggests that the range and possibilities of
emotional experience are limited in collective child rearing.
The child feels a great deal more secure in the group than
in a nuclear family. On the Kibbutz the group is the god
on which the person depends. In the family it is the
mother and the father. The Kibbutz child never feels the
anxiety of possibly losing her or his source of security.
Bettelheim argues that a middle-class child’s dependency
on the parents and fear of losing them results in a process
of introjection whereby the child internalizes the parents
as a means of possessing them. For Bettelheim, the process
of introjection trains the child in the ability to assume the
role of others and speculate about different ways of living.
When asking Kibbutz youths questions like, “How do you
think you would have felt about kibbutz life if you’d been
bom and raised in the city?” he would receive answers
like, “I wasn’t raised there, so I can’t answer that.” “To
122
move outside the self and take a look at it,” Bettelheim
observes, “was not a stance common to these
youngsters .” 1 2
Bettelheim’s description of the effects of collective child
rearing raises some very interesting questions. For instance,
while the nuclear, triangular family can be viewed as a
source of dependency on authoritarian figures, it can also
be seen as providing an opportunity for the child to
separate herself or himself from the rest of society and
develop a private self. This separation of self through the
mechanism of the family can be viewed in both a positive
and negative light. Negatively it can be argued that the
individualism spawned by the family leads to a selfish
individualism which works against social cooperation. This
is one of the arguments given in favor of the collective
education of the Kibbutz in that it fosters social coopera-
tion. On the positive side it can be argued that the family
situation allows for the type of social separation and
conditions basic to developing the mechanism of revolt.
Revolt against the family is the first step in throwing off
the control of society.
One can argue from this perspective that the major
problem with collective child rearing and the development
of a collective superego is that this superego is all-
controlling and does not provide mechanisms for indi-
vidual rejection or revolt. This may make little difference
in the Kibbutz, where there is collective ownership and
control. But in advanced industrial countries the spread of
collective child-rearing practices would not necessarily
imply a total reform of the social system. If previous
experience is any guide, schools have always tended to
reflect the inequalities of society.
The questions raised about the Kibbutz can be directed
toward Summerhill as well. Certainly Neill envisioned a
series of Summerhills as part of a socialist society. This
would supposedly make collective child rearing a part of a
just society. But it should be recognized that the dynamics
123
of Western society which are currently providing impetus
for collective child rearing are directed not toward the
liberation of the child but toward the liberation of women
from the trap of the home. Within this context, collective
child rearing simply institutionalizes the existing patterns
of society as far as children are concerned. It is a dreary
prospect to think of public schools operating child-care
centers. That would be the final triumph of the process of
schooling.
This also raises the question of whether present trends
in collective child retiring would only provide for women’s
escape from the burden of the home and not for female
liberation. Feminists like Emma Goldman argued that
there could be no women’s liberation as long as society
retained its present form of organization. Writing in the
early twentieth century, she argued that it was certainly
not any glorious independence for women to be forced to
type in offices, to sew in sweat shops, or to stand behind
counters in department stores. For Goldman work of this
nature was ample reason for women to rush into marriage
at the first offer to escape their supposed “independence.”
To liberate women would mean to liberate society from its
existing social and economic structure. 1 3
ONE SOLUTION TO THIS DILEMMA might be to reverse
the problem and think of it in terms of freeing the child
from the family, releasing the child from a state of
dependence upon controlling institutions. The problem
with the collective education of the Kibbutz is that it
serves a particular end and does not allow for the
self-development of the individual separate from the
group. If the Kibbutz schools were eliminated and the
children at an early age were integrated into the adult life
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of the community, that might provide a partial solution.
The fact that formal schools exist on the Kibbutz appears
as a cultural remnant of middle-class society. The founders
of the Kibbutz assumed that schools were a natural part of
all societies. But in the drive for women’s rights, it should
not be assumed that the best solutions lie in the expansion
of schooling.
This argument leads back to the possible solution of
simultaneously liberating children from the modem cate-
gory of childhood and emancipating women from the
burden of extended periods of child rearing. This solution
suggests two possible directions we might take. The first
possibility is to organize society so that all people,
including children, have a useful social role. In the
twentieth century the rise of schooling and the increase in
early retirement are directly connected to higher produc-
tivity and advanced technology. Essentially our economy
has told young people and older people that they are no
longer useful. Youths are put into schools and older people
are sent to retirement communities. To change this would
mean viewing the child as a miniature adult, with all the
rights and status of adulthood. As Aries found to be the
case during the Middle Ages, the child would participate in
adult activities and would be treated as an adult.
The second possible direction would be to accept the
separation of production and consumption that exists in
our society for certain age groups— that is, to accept the
fact that children and youth function as consumers but
not as producers. Right now, of course, this situation only
breeds greater dependence; in the proposed solution,
however, children and youth up to a certain age, such as
twenty-one, would be given a guaranteed income which
would allow them to leave home at an early age without
necessarily having to attend a custodial institution. The
young people would be allowed to spend that income in
any manner they chose. This would destroy children’s
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dependency on the family and school, and would end the
obligation of the woman to assume the responsibility for a
lengthy period of child rearing. The proposal would have
an advantage over the previous one in that it might avoid
the exploitation of children and youth by the industrial
process. It would have the disadvantage of possibly
keeping children financially dependent on the state.
While the above proposals are only speculative, they do
suggest possible goals. If the abolition of the nuclear
family is an essential step in the drive toward women’s
emancipation, it would be better, and essential in the long
run, for the child to be liberated in the process than to be
subjected to an expanded system of control through
schooling. This liberation requires that the barriers of
modem concepts of childhood be transcended. At as early
an age as possible the child must become a miniature adult,
a person exercising all the rights and privileges that we now
confer on adults.
t
CERTAIN LIBERTARIAN GOALS might be achieved if
society broke through modem concepts of childhood.
Such concepts treat the child as an object and not as a
subject of the social process. Viewed as an object to be
worked upon, the child becomes a focal point for the
imposition of ideals and ideologies. In the United States in
the twentieth century we have witnessed repeated
attempts to solve social problems, ranging from poverty to
venereal disease, by attempting to shape the character of
the child in the school. Because the child has been viewed
as an object, childhood has become a dumping ground for
a myriad of attempted solutions of social problems. If
children became subjects or participants in the shaping of
society, they would become actors in the making of
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history. As Paulo Freire suggests, the difference between
being human and being animal-like is the exercise of
consciousness and the participation as a subject in the
making of history. The child treated as an object is treated
as an animal. The child treated as a subject would be
treated as a human being.
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6
PRESENT REALITIES AND
FUTURE PROSPECTS
THE THEORIES OF EDUCATION discussed in this book
represent one aspect of the battle for control of the mind
of the child that has occurred over the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. Any consideration of their value and
meaning must be made against the background of the
present organization and purposes of education and an
evaluation of the present possibilities of social change
through the use of educational techniques. Radical
theories of education have been based on an assumption
common to most modern societies— that one of the key
elements in organizing a society is the nature of the
educational and child-rearing system. It is this system
which shapes the future members of society.
The real disagreements, therefore, go beyond educa-
tional technique; they involve the very nature of social
change. Theories of education are just one very important
aspect of an overall theoretical perspective about how
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society should change. We can identify fundamental
differences in theoretical perspectives about social change
in different educational methods. Two distinct models
emerge. One model has a technological and rationalistic
orientation which seeks social improvement through more
orderly social planning and increased efficiency. This is a
model which in the twentieth century has tended to cut
across ideological lines; it has been embraced by liberal,
fascist, and communist countries alike. This model is
concerned primarily with increased economic productivity
and social stability. Society is conceived of as a machine
with the goal of efficient operation. People become
“human resources” whose values are determined by their
contribution to the smooth functioning of the social
machinery.
In this model the child is treated as an object to be
worked upon and shaped for the good of society. As I have
demonstrated in another book, this is the model of the
“good society” that pervaded the organization of the
public schools in the United States in the twentieth
century. The modem high school, vocational guidance, and
testing were all conceived of as means of increasing the
efficiency of the social machinery. The raw human
resources of children would be classified, sorted, and
shaped, then sent from the schools into their proper niches
in society . 1
The nature of the other model of social change may be
deduced from the philosophies of education considered in
this book. Here the concern is not with order and
efficiency but with increasing individual autonomy. The
goal of social change is increased individual participation
and control of the social system. This model rests on the
conviction that a great deal of the power of modem social
institutions depends on the willingness of the people to
accept the authority and legitimacy of these institutions.
In this context the question becomes, not how to fit the
individual into the social machine, but why people are
130
willing to accept work without personal satisfaction and
social authority which limits freedom. This condition of
acceptance, as has been argued in this volume, is primarily
the result of the ideals, beliefs, and ideologies in the mind
of the child. As a result, the individual believes it is one’s
duty to work for some good which might not have any
relationship to one’s own needs and desires. The goal of
this libertarian model is therefore an educational method
which will encourage and support non-authoritarian indi-
viduals who are unwilling to bow to authority and who
demand a social organization which provides them with
maximum individual control and freedom.
An implicit assumption of the theories discussed in this
volume is that changes in methods of education and child
rearing can contribute to a radical transformation of
society. This assumption raises questions about the value
of these theories in our present society. Is it a waste of
energy to direct one’s concerns toward educational
changes as a means of social change? Should one concen-
trate on other social and economic changes and let
educational change follow in their wake? Will educational
systems always be a mirror of the surrounding society?
One way of approaching these questions is to consider
the social uses of public education in the United States in
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the first place,
it is naive to assume that the educational systems precisely
mirror the surrounding society. Society has never been
homogeneous and without conflicting interests. There has
never been a consensus about the goals and methods of
public education. What has happened in fact is that the
goals and methods of education have mirrored the goals
and interests of those who have power in society . 2
This situation has resulted in public education being
used primarily as a conservative force for the solution of
social problems. The use of public education as an
instrument of social improvement has allowed people to
act as if they were doing good without making any
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fundamental changes in society. In the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries education has been viewed as a means
of ending poverty, crime, and urban disorder by teaching
the child in the schoolhouse proper social attitudes and
work habits. This means the individual is told he or she is
the problem and not that the social system needs to be
changed. Everyone can rally around the flag of the
schoolhouse without threatening the existing organization
of society. Certainly, this was the situation in the 1960’s
when President Lyndon Johnson translated the demands
of the civil rights movement into a theory of cultural
deprivation, arguing that salvation from poverty and
racism could be found in an improved educational system.
When in the 1970’s everyone awoke to the fact that the
educational system had not eliminated racism or poverty,
people began to argue that education had very little to
offer in the way of social change. 3
This conclusion is correct if one assumes that edu-
cation’s role is what Paulo Freire has called the banking
system of education, which in fact tends to support social
rigidity. Certainly the theories considered in this volume,
however, connect changes in education to an ongoing
program of social change. Part of their emphasis is that no
social change is meaningful unless people participate in its
formulation. And this applies, as well, to children.
THE WEDDING OF revolutionary thought to radical
pedagogy had its roots in a profound pessimism, a feeling
that revolutionary social and economic changes in the
twentieth century had resulted in totalitarian states— the
Soviet Union, for example, where revolutionary impulses
were followed by a period of conservative dictatorship.
Why the failure of this revolutionary endeavor? For people
like Reich, Neill, and Freire the answer lies in its failure to
provide radically new means of education and socialization
by which all people could be brought into the revolution-
ary movement and become acting members of it rather
than its objects.
From this perspective, a radical educational theory
makes sense only if it is seen as part of a total
revolutionary endeavor. One of the most serious problems
facing the present and future development of libertarian
forms of education is the dangerous separation of educa-
tional methods from a political and social ideology.
Radical experiments in education tend to be trivialized as
fast as they are developed. Paulo Freire ’s techniques Eire
adopted by the Peace Corps and the free school methods
of Summerhill are introduced into the classrooms of the
public school without any relationship to their underlying
radical ideology. What begins as a radical movement is
quickly absorbed by the existing system; new techniques
are used, but only to accomplish the old objectives of
control and discipline. The Summerhillian approach, triv-
ialized within the public school classroom, becomes a
warm, loving, and free method of teaching the same
subject matter and producing the same character struc-
ture. 4 One obvious example of this process is the
movement for day-care centers. Once divorced from a
movement to change the family and to free society from
the authoritarian personality and state control, the day-
care center becomes an instrument for dominating the
population. Day-care centers are now being used as a
means of controlling the poor by creating a new institu-
tional family structure and by avoiding any major changes
in the economic system by forcing the welfare mother to
work. Day-care centers are provided not to relieve people
from an authoritarian family structure, but to provide
them with one that they are believed to lack.
The future of any radical endeavor in education depends
upon maintaining the link between educational methods
and a libertarian perspective. The social critique, the
planning, and the methods must all be kept together.
132
133
Certainly, the greatness of John Dewey was his ability to
link a psychological definition of humanity to a total
social philosophy, and then to develop educational
methods based on that concept of humanity and guided by
that social philosophy. All methods and content in
education affect character and action. Consequently, all
educational techniques reflect some ideological position.
For instance, Paulo Freire has certainly shown that the
teaching of reading and writing might be the most political
act in education. If education is pursued without a
conscious radical perspective, it will do nothing but serve
the existing social order.
It should also be clearly understood that there are two
distinct ways of talking about education’s potential to
have a radical effect on society. On the one hand,
educational systems such as Paulo Freire’s can provide a
method which liberates individuals so that they will act to
bring about a radical change in society. On the other hand,
an educational establishment itself may directly affect
society, as in the case of a day-care center which weakens
the family structure. Both approaches can be combined
within one system. A.S. Neill’s dream of a socialist state
with Summerhill schools was directed both at weakening
the family and at creating the self-regulated individual.
While the above arguments would seem to demonstrate
that there is something called radical education which can
have a meaningful role in radical social change, it does not
answer the question of whether it is worthwhile to direct
one’s energies toward educational change rather than
concentrating on other areas of social change. One reply,
of course, could emphasize the essential role of educa-
tional change in any radical movement, as our theorists
have stressed. But this reply avoids the problem of the
existence of a tremendously powerful and complex educa-
tional establishment with its increasingly effective mecha-
nisms for absorbing criticism and utilizing any educational
method for its own purposes. This is not to suggest that
134
there is any conspiratorial group manipulating the educa-
tional system. If this were true, the problem might be
much simpler. In reality this educational establishment is a
complex web of often competing groups. In the United
States these groups range from professional teaching
organizations and unions, through administrative organiza-
tions, schools of education, publishing companies, and
testing organizations, to state legislatures, national policy
groups, and the federal government.
Any attempt to make a radical pedagogy part of a
radical political and social movement must come to terms
with this educational establishment. The neglect of
attempts to change this educational establishment would
mean the neglect of an entire generation which is held in
the custodial control of the school. Moreover, a very good
case can be made for political and social movements to have
to direct some energy toward educational change since the
school is one of the major public institutions, second only to
the Defense Department in terms of public expenditures.
If we talk about change in our social institutions, we
certainly cannot neglect one of the largest and most
intrusive of them. In fact, it is the one public institution
which has the most contact with all members of society.
The school, in short, must be approached first of all as a
political and social institution. To give concrete meaning
to theories of radical education— to that which can be — one
must begin by coming to terms with that which exists. The
one major shortcoming of radical educational theorists has
been their failure to deal with the reality of existing
educational systems and how their theories might be
implemented. For instance, it is fine for A.S. Neill to
establish a model like Summerhill, but Summerhill has
little meaning unless it can be implemented throughout
society. Neill was never very helpful about the strategies
one might use to convert an entire educational system to
that model. The failure of many free schools in the 1960’s
was a direct result of not making a concrete assessment of
135
the political workings of public schooling and developing
of strategies to confront and change that system. Many of
these schools just languished outside the system, without
money or power. What this means is that if radical
pedagogy is to be made part of a radical movement, it can
not act as if it were creating a new educational system in a
vacuum. Strategies must be developed to confront the
political realities of the existing educational establishment.
LET US CONSIDER some possible strategies for radical-
izing American education. Any plan for meaningful educa-
tional change must affect the whole spectrum of educa-
tional power. There must not only be alternative
educational models, but also a legal campaign to change
educational laws, a fight for a different system of
educational funding, an understanding of the need for
children’s rights, an emphasis on women’s rights and
changing the structure of the family, and a campaign to
change the nature and direction of research in the schools
of education of major universities.
One of the first steps that could be taken would be the
elimination of compulsory education . 5 A campaign against
compulsory education laws might be conducted, either
through the courts or on the floor of state legislatures. No
radical educational plan can really be developed if all
children are required to attend a school approved by the
state government. But at the same time compulsory
education laws are attacked, it must be recognized that
they were originally developed to solve certain social
problems, namely child labor and juvenile delinquency.
Compulsory education does protect children from eco-
nomic exploitation and does serve the custodial function
of occupying time. Thus, the end of compulsory education
136
would have to be accompanied by a change in the
economic structure which allowed for the financial inde-
pendence of youth.
An economic change of this nature could have a direct
effect upon the family. Because the increased duration of
schooling has prolonged the child’s dependency upon the
family structure, heads of household must earn an income
above their personal needs in order to support their
dependents— children or other non-wage-eaming members
of the family. To alleviate this economic dependence on
the family, the surplus income of the head of the
household could be rechanneled to the children. This
might involve a plan which would levy a tax on adults for
the support of children. Accompanying this economic
change could be changes in the legal rights of children. For
instance, children might remain within the custody of the
family until the age of twelve or thirteen. Up to that point
the child’s income from the state would be used as an
educational voucher. The child and the family would make
a decision about how the money should be used for
educational purposes. This would break the monopoly of
public schools and allow for the use of a wide variety of
alternative schools. Then, at the age of thirteen or
fourteen, youths would be recognized as being legally
independent of the family and allowed to leave home if
they so desired. Income would be guaranteed by the state
until the age of twenty-one. Before the age of thirteen or
fourteen children would be able to ask the courts to
remove them from intolerable home situations.
Economic independence would allow for the changing
of other laws affecting youth. Child labor laws could be
eliminated because youths would no longer be vulnerable
to exploitation on the labor market . 6 Youths could choose
jobs because of interest and desire to learn. There could also
be a campaign to insure adolescent sexual freedom. Not
only could all restrictive laws be removed but birth-control
devices and information might be provided. Economic
137
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independence and legal changes hopefully would overcome
what Wilhelm Reich referred to as the “housing prob-
lems.” Independent residences might be made available to
youths. Society, in short, could recognize the legitimacy of
adolescent sexual activity.
The economic independence of youth would represent a
major step in the liberation of women. Traditionally, girls
and young women have been under the control of the
family for longer periods of time than their male counter-
parts. Even marriage at an early age only results in a shift
from the control of one head of the household to another.
A major source of female dependence on the family is the
lack of easy access to occupations which provide economic
independence. Combined with this economic problem is
the traditional attitude that women must be protected by
the home and denied the social independence of their male
counterparts. Providing women with equal economic inde-
pendence would hopefully allow them the same type of
social freedom and opportunity for development.
The elimination of compulsory education and the
shifting of educational funding from the level of the school
to that of the individual could break the power of the
educational bureaucracy. It should be recognized that in
the United States, control of the school does not really
reside in the local boards of education . 7 Such important
educational issues as curriculum, content of textbooks, and
requirements for teacher certification are decided within
an interlocking educational bureaucracy which includes
professional organizations, state officials, universities, and
publishing companies— not to mention the new learning
corporations like IBM and Educational Testing Services,
which represent the most important and rapidly growing
parts of this bureaucracy.
One way to weaken the power of this educational
bureaucracy would be to avoid any supervision of educa-
tional spending, leaving decisions about how the money
should be spent completely up to the individual. That
138
would mean parental supervision until the child was twelve
or thirteen; after that, the individual youth would have
absolute control over the spending of the money. If a
government body were established to supervise the spend-
ing, it would be likely to fall under the power of the same
social and economic influences which have surrounded the
school. Instead, we could develop a democratic system
which placed control in the hands of the individual. The
practice of freedom is the best exercise in learning how to
use freedom. What little money might be lost or
squandered at an individual level would be nothing
compared to the amount of money wasted and squandered
within the existing educational structure. The history of
government control and regulation in the United States has
been one of creating what has been called a “socialism for
the rich.” We could exercise a traditional American
distrust for government organizations as sources of power
for those in control, and instead place our faith in
individual actions.
The demise of the existing educational structure could
be accompanied by the recognition that the concept of the
school is out of date in modem technological society. The
schools in the nineteenth century was viewed not only as a
source of social control but also as a center where all the
materials of learning, books and teachers, could be
concentrated. With mass media and urban living there is no
reason why a person should not be able to learn the basic
skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic just by growing
and interacting within the community. Ivan Illich’s De-
schooling Society has certainly offered path-breaking
suggestions in this direction.
One of the immediate questions that occur when it is
suggested that the school be eliminated is: What happens
to the poor? Is not the school their only hope? How will
they learn growing up in a culture of poverty? Without the
school will there not be even greater social class dif-
ferences? In response, it should be clearly recognized that
139
schooling has not eliminated poverty in the past nor will it
in the future. To use the school to solve problems of
poverty is to seek a conservative solution without directly
changing the social structure which created poverty. It
should also be recognized that schooling as a system of
social selection has tended to reinforce the existing social
class structure. But to get rid of the school is certainly not
going to eliminate poverty. In other words, having schools
or not having schools is not going to make that much
difference because schools are not at the heart of the
problem of poverty. But if the school were eliminated and
at the same time children and youth were given economic
independence, the problem of poverty would be con-
fronted directly. Poor children would have enough money
to explore and enjoy the advantages now reserved for the
middle class.
The next question, of course, is whether the culture of
poverty doesn’t hinder and limit the type of choices made
by the parents and youth. The answer, of course, is yes.
But this “yes” must be qualified in two ways. First, the
poor are better judges of how their educational money
should be spent than the traditional leaders in the
educational bureaucracy. Second, the legal and legislative
campaign directed against compulsory education and
educational funding could be accompanied by the radicali-
zation of the schools of education in major universities.
This would provide a center for dealing directly with the
problems raised by a culture of poverty by utilizing
community education programs based on methods like
Paulo Freire’s and by developing techniques of radical
therapy.
The radicalization of faculties of education would
involve completely changing their conception of their own
function. The educators would have to raise a whole new
set of questions— questions very different from those
which have occupied traditional pedagogical theory. As
Wilhelm Reich suggested in the 1920’s, nothing of major
140
consequence can be accomplished by treatment at an
individual level. If repression exists on a society-wide level,
the solution is not individual treatment but changing those
social conditions and institutions which cause repression.
Individual therapy is essentially conservative because it
leaves untouched the source of the problem. The same
difficulty exists with schools and the faculties of education
which have served those schools. Treatment of social
problems has tended to be at an individual and conserva-
tive level. There is an attempt to overcome the culture of
poverty by treating the child within the confines of the
school. The real solution lies in directly attacking the
social conditions which keep a person from learning and
growing in our society.
One of the major obstacles in radicalizing faculties of
education will be their traditional relationship to the
process of schooling. Education departments and schools
of education have tended to see their function primarily as
one of serving the needs of the public schools by supplying
teachers and services. Very often a large number of
university people studying education have come from the
ranks of public schooling and consider the department of
education as an extension of the public schools. Histori-
cally, that is the reason for the establishment of normal
schools and colleges of education. The consequence of this
process has been a severe limitation on the study and
development of meaningful educational processes.
The results of this narrow focus are reflected in the
various disciplines within education. Today all such dis-
ciplines are directed toward serving the schools. Teacher
training is designed primarily to prepare a person to teach
standard subjects within a public school classroom. The
nature of education courses is governed by the require-
ments for state certification. Educational psychology as a
discipline in education tends to focus on the psychology of
classroom management. It sees itself as supplying the
scientific tools for teaching within the classroom and
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managing a captive audience of students. Both the research
and content of instruction are centered on learning within
the context of the classroom. Educational sociology tends
to follow the same path and concentrates on classroom
and school social interaction and the handling of cultural
differences within the school. The teaching of educational
history, like United States history in the public schools, is
largely a matter of selling certain ideas and beliefs.
Educational philosophy has tended to get lost within the
process of defining and clarifying the goals of public
schooling.
Radical groups, students, and faculty could begin to
place pressure on faculties of education to rechart the
direction of American education. 8 This pressure could be
applied internally, through the teaching and research of
individual faculty members, and through the demand by
students for a different type of educational program.
Outside groups, such as alternative schools, could place
pressure on the universities to supply the same types of
services as are extended to the public schools. The demand
could be made that universities not exclusively serve the
needs of public schooling but begin to look at the
educational process within the framework of a broad
cultural perspective.
One of the first things that might be done would be to
separate teacher training from the state certification
requirements. This might initially involve proposing two
separate courses of study in teacher training. One of these
would lead to state certification and the other to the
development and implementation of methods like Paulo
Freire’s. This second course of study would provide a base
for the collection of material and training of workers for
community action. Teachers trained in methods like
Freire’s could go into poverty areas and establish educa-
tional programs outside the public school system to
develop social consciousness. The teacher training pro-
grams could also provide facilities for training minority
142
group leaders, like Native Americans and blacks, in
Freirian or other techniques.
Educational sociology and psychology could work
together to accomplish what Wilhelm Reich called radical
therapy. Both of these disciplines could begin to look at
the problem of why certain people within our society
cannot learn without relying upon the authoritarian
structure of the school. If such dependency does not exist,
we can safely abandon the school and rely on every
individual to grow and learn in his or her own manner. But
one suspects that at this stage, there are still many barriers
to free and independent learning. This might be partic-
ularly true in cultures of poverty. The job for psychology
and sociology would be to identify those barriers which
create a state of dependency in the learning process. Is the
problem, as Reich suggested, mainly centered around the
existence of the nuclear family? Is the problem more
directly related to the economic conditions of poverty? Is it
a result of the structure and the conditions of our modem
urban environment? These and a host of other
questions immediately come to mind. Sociology and
psychology could then go on to identify those social
conditions which would allow people to live and grow in
the world without the authoritarian control of the schools.
They could develop a radical therapy which would result
in major changes in our society. If children cannot learn,
one must not stop with just helping them to overcome
their immediate problem. One must identify those social
conditions which hinder their learning and directly attack
those conditions.
Educational sociology could also assume the extra
burden of studying the nature of control and economic
exploitation in education. At a local level studies need to
be made of the relationship between local elites and
control of education. Such studies, linking the ideology of
the school with the ideology of a particular social class,
would follow in the tradition of George Counts’ early
143
studies on the social composition of school boards. In
addition, students might be mobilized to study the
financial dealings of local school districts and watch for
possible conflicts of interest. What needs to be done on a
national level is a study of the national power elite in
education. This would include a study of the educational
leaders who move easily between foundations, publishing
companies, universities, educational organizations, and the
federal educational establishment. It would be interesting
to study the ideology of this power elite and its effect
upon education.
The history and philosophy of education could begin to
study the relationship between ideology and educational
practice which includes the whole socialization process.
Any theory about the socialization process is based on a
concept of human nature and directed toward a vision of
what ought to be. Theories of the family, community,
school, city planning, and other related parts of the
socialization process would be defined in terms of these
underlying ideologies. History and philosophy could make
these ideological assumptions explicit, examining them
both in their historical context and in their present manifes-
tations. It should be the responsibility of these two
disciplines to assure that educational methods do not
become isolated from their political and social roots.
WHILE ALL THE ABOVE STRATEGIES are tentative,
they do represent the kinds of practical things that must
be considered if radical education is to have any meaning.
There must be a clear development of how theory can be
put into practice in the modem world. For years American
educators have wondered why the educational philosophy
of John Dewey has so little influence on the daily
workings of the public school classroom. Part of the
answer can be found in Dewey’s own writings. While
144
Dewey certainly translated his philosophy into classroom
methods, he never suggested ways the educational estab-
lishment could be changed so that his methods could be
put into practice. Dewey’s method became a topic of
discussion but not a practical tool. In the same way,
radical pedagogy could become just a topic for discussion
unless it orients itself politically toward die realities of the
existing educational structure.
One hundred years ago it would have been difficult to
convince large numbers of people that changing educa-
tional institutions was a necessary part of political and
economic change. Today this is equally true because social and
economic forces have made schools one of the central
controlling agencies in society. For this reason schools
must become a part of any attempt at major social
change. This does not necessarily mean an extension of
schooling; it could as easily mean the limitation or
elimination of schooling. What must be kept in mind is
that mass schooling is a product of a particular set of
historical forces which has made it into one of the major
institutions for planned socialization.
What must also be kept in mind is the distinction
between schooling and education. Schooling has been a
planned method of socialization designed to produce
obedient workers and citizens through a system of
institutional controls. On the other hand, education can
mean gaining knowledge and ability by which one can
transform the world and maximize individual autonomy.
Education can be a source of individual liberation. One of
the internal contradictions within the present system of
schooling relates to this distinction. Modem workers do
need basic skills and some degree of understanding of the
world and, consequently, must be given some education. It
very often happens that this education raises the level of
awareness enough to cause rebellion against the process of
socialization or schooling. This has occurred in the last ten
years in student protests and demands for protection of
145
I
individual liberties and rights. Unfortunately this has
occurred mainly in middle-class schools where there is still
some semblance of education. Poor children have been
primarily well schooled and not well educated.
Presently in the United States there is a movement to
eliminate all vestiges of education in favor of something
called “career education.” The career education movement
holds as a basic tenet of faith that all learning must be
directed toward the needs of some future occupation.
Learning is made subservient to a future social role and the
socialization process of the school. Knowledge is not
presented as a means of understanding and critically
analyzing social and economic forces but as a means of
subservience to the social structure. “Career education”
could represent the logical outcome of the controlling
power of schooling . 9
What must be sought in the future is a system of
education which raises the level of individual consciousness
to an understanding of the social and historical forces that
have created the existing society and determined an
individual’s place in that society. This must occur through
a combination of theory and practice in which both change
as all people work for a liberated society. There should not
be a blueprint for future change but, rather, a constant
dialogue about means and ends. Education should be at
the heart of such a revolutionary endeavor.
(&
146
FOOTNOTES
Chapter I
1 Samuel Bowles, “Understanding Unequal Economic Oppor-
tunity, ’’American Economic Review, Vol. LXIII, No. 2, May 1973,
pp. 346-356; Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, “I.Q. in the U.S.
Class Structure,” Social Policy, Vol. 3, Nos. 4 and 5, Nov./Dec. 1972
and Jan./Feb. 1973; Samuel Bowles, “Schooling and Inequality from
Generation to Generation,” Journal of Political Economy, May /June
1972.
2 A good biography and summary of Godwin’s ideas is George
Woodcock’s William Godwin (London: The Porcupine Press, 1946).
3 William Godwin, “An Account of the Seminary ... At Epsom
in Surrey,” in Four Early Pamphlets (Gainesville, Florida: Scholars’
Facsimiles and Reprints, 1966), p. 150.
4 William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its
Influence on Morals and Happiness (Toronto: The University of
Toronto Press, 1946), Vol. II, p. 302.
5 See Woodcock, op. cit., pp. 63-73.
6 Godwin, Enquiry Concerning . . . , Vol. II, pp. 302-303.
147
j
7 Ibid., Vol. II, p. 304.
8 Ibid.
9 See Johann Gottlieb Fichte, “The Nature of the New Educa-
tion,” in Addresses to the German Nation, trans. by R.F. Jones and
G.H. Turnbull (Chicago: Open Court Publishing Co., 1922).
1 0 See Henry Barnard on Education edited by John S. Brubacher
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1931), p. 74.
1 1 This is taken from George Mosse’s fine anthology of Nazi
Culture (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1966).
1 2 For further elaboration of radical reaction to schooling in the
United States see Chapter VII of my book Education and the Rise of
the Corporate State (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972).
13 Francisco Ferrer, “L’Ecole Renovee,” Mother Earth (Nov.,
1909), Vol. IV, No. 9, p. 269.
14 Ibid., p. 268.
15 Ibid.,p. 272.
1 6 Ibid.
1 7 Francisco Ferrer, The Origin and Ideals of the Modern School,
trans. by Joseph McCabe (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1913),
p. 48.
1 8 Ferrer, “L’Ecole Renovee,” p. 269.
1 9 William Godwin, The Enquirer (London: C.G. & J. Robinson,
1797), pp. 66-97.
20 Harry Kelly, “The Modern School in Retrospect,” in The
Modern School of Stelton (Stelton, New Jersey: The Modern School
Association of North America, 1925), p. 115.
2 1 For Ivan Illich’s expansion of the concept of alienation see his
paper The Breakdown of Schools (Cuernavaca, Mexico: CIDOC,
Apr., 1971), pp. 11-19.
2 2 See Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970).
23 See A.B. Hollinshead, Elmtown’s Youth (New York: John
Wiley & Sons, 1949).
Chapter II
1 Francisco Ferrer, The Origin and Ideals of the Modern School,
pp. 89-90.
2 Jean Jacques Rousseau, Emile (New York: Dutton, 1911).
3 For a biographical sketch of Stimer’s life see George Wood-
748
cock’s Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements
(Cleveland: The World Publishing Co., 1969), pp. 94-105.
4 Max Stimer, The Ego and His Own: The Case of the Individual
Against Authority, trans. by Steven T. Byington (New York:
Libertarian Book Club, 1963), p. 342.
5 Max Stimer, The False Principle of Our Education, trans. by
Robert H. Beebe (Colorado Springs: Ralph Myles, 1967), p. 23.
6 Stimer, The Ego and His Own, pp. 106-7.
7 Ibid. , p. 242.
8 Ibid., p. 52, 342.
9 Ibid. , pp. 330-335.
10 Ibid., pp. 200-209.
11 Ibid. , pp. 173-185.
1 2 Emma Goldman, “The Child and Its Enemies,” Mother Earth
(April, 1906), Vol. I, No. 2, pp. 12-13.
1 3 Ferrer, The Origin and Ideas of the Modern School, pp. 76-87.
14 Ibid. , p. 29.
1 5 Ibid., p. 76.
1 6 Ibid., pp. 86-89, 89-90.
1 7 Goldman, “The Child and Its Enemies,” p. 9.
1 8 Leo Tolstoy, “Education and Culture,” in Tolstoy on Educa-
tion, trans. by Leo Wiener (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1967).
1 9 Stimer, The False Principle of Our Education, p. 23.
20 Ibid. , pp. 1-25.
21 Ivan Blich, “The Breakdown of Schools: a problem or a
SYMPTOM?” (Cuernavaca, Mexico 71.04.21), pp. 11-19.
22 Elizabeth Bums Ferm, “Activity and Passivity of the Educa-
tor,” Mother Earth (March, 1907), Vol. II, No. 1, p. 26.
2 3 Colin Ward, “Adventure Playground: A Parable of Anarchy,”
Anarchy 7 (1961), pp. 193-201.
24 Ibid.
25 George Dennison, “The First Street School,” in Radical
School Reform, edited by Ronald and Beatrice Gross (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1969), pp. 227-246.
26 See Paul Goodman’s New Reformation: Notes of a Neolithic
Consermtive (New York: Random House, 1970), and Communitas
(New York: Random House, 1965).
27 Paul Goodman, Compulsory Mis-Education and The Com-
munity of Scholars (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), p. 57.
149
28 Ibid., pp. 30-34.
29 See Ivan Dlich, Celebration of Awareness: A Call for Institu-
tional Revolution (New York: Doubleday, 1971), and De-Schooling
Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1971).
Chapter HI
1 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (New
York: International Publishers Inc., 1939), pp. 1-2.
2 Ibid., p. 14.
3 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. by Myra
Berman Ramos (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970), p. 85.
4 Ibid., pp. 111-112.
5 Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, trans. by
T.B. Bottomore in Erich Fromm’s Marx's Concept of Man (New
York: Frederick Ungar Co., 1961), p. 101.
6 Ibid.
7 Rollo May, “The Emergence of Existential Psychology,” in
Existential Psychology edited by Rollo May (New York: Random
House, 1960), p. 44.
8 Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, pp. 119-121.
9 Marx, The German Ideology, p. 20.
10 Karl Marx, Capital, trans. by Samuel Moore and Edward
Aveling (London: Swan Sonnenschein and Co., Ltd., 1904), p. 423.
1 1 John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: The Free
Press, 1966), pp. 250-261.
1 2 Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, p. 59.
1 3 Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, p. 98.
14 Ibid., pp. 93-109.
1 5 Marx, The German Ideology, p. 39.
1 6 Paulo Freire, “The Adult Literacy Process as Cultural Action
for Freedom,” Harvard Educational Review, Vol. 40, 1970, No. 2,
p. 216.
1 7 Carl R. Rogers, Client-Centered Therapy (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Company, 1965), p. 488.
18 Ibid. , p. 513.
19 Ibid. , p. 522.
20 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, pp. 119-186.
21 See Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Palo Alto:
Ramparts, 1971).
150
if
22 Paulo Freire, “Cultural Action and Conscientization,” Harvard
Educational Review, Vol. 40, 1970, No. 3, pp. 452-475.
Chapter IV
1 A.S. Neill, “The Man Reich,” in Wilhelm Reich by A.S. Neill,
Paul and Jean Ritter, Myron Sharaf, Nic Wool (Nottingham: The
Ritter Press, 1958), p. 21.
2 See Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (London:
Hogarth Press, 1949).
3 Wilhelm Reich, The Discovery of the Orgone: The Function of
the Orgasm (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970), p. 133.
4 Ibid., p. 53.
5 Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, p. 19.
5 Ibid., pp. 19-34.
7 Reich, The Discovery of Orgone . . . , pp. 114-130.
8 Ibid., p. 124.
9 Ibid. pp. 143-163.
10 Ibid., p. 156.
1 1 Ibid., p. 158.
12 Ibid. , p. 153.
13 Wilhelm Reich, The Invasion of Compulsory Sex-Morality
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971), p. 146.
14 Wilhelm Reich, The Sexual Revolution (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1962), p. 72.
15 Ibid. , p. 77.
1 6 Ibid., p. 79.
1 7 Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, pp. 32, 55-59.
18 Ibid. , pp. 68-74.
1 9 Ibid., p. 61.
20 Reich, The Sexual Revolution, p. xiv.
2 1 Ibid., pp. 153-160.
22 Ibid., pp. 240-247.
23 Reich, The Invasion of Compulsory . . . , pp. 9-10.
24 Reich, The Sexual Revolution, pp. 243-246.
25 Ibid. , p. 236.
26 Ibid., p. 237.
27 Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, p. 377.
28 Wilhelm Reich, The Murder of Christ (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1971).
151
j
29 A.S. Neill, The Problem Child (New York: Robert M.
McBride, 1927), pp. 18, 114.
30 Ibid., p. 52.
31 A.S. Neill, The Problem Family (New York: Hermitage Press,
1949), p. 17.
32 A.S. Neill, “The Man Reich,” pp. 24-25.
33 Neill, The Problem Child, p. 100.
34 Ibid. , pp. 211,231-232.
35 A.S. Neill, “Authority and Freedom in the School,” The New
Era, 16:23 (January, 1935), pp. 22-25.
36 A.S. Neill, The Problem Teacher (New York: The Inter-
national Press, 1944), pp. 19-32.
37 Ibid., p. 27.
38 A.S. Neill, Hearts Not Heads in the School (London: Herbert
Jenkins Ltd., 1944), pp. 31-34.
39 Ibid., 21.
40 Neill, The Problem Family, p. 177.
41 Ibid., 173.
42 Ibid.,p. 151.
Chapter V
1 Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of
Family Life, translated by Robert Baldick (New York: Vintage
Books, 1962), p. 441.
2 Frank Musgrove, Youth and the Social Order (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964).
3 Clarence J. Karier, Paul Violas, and Joel Spring, Roots of Crisis
(Chicago: Rand McNally, 1973).
4 Melford E. Spiro, Kibbutz (New York: Schocken Books,
1970).
5 Ibid. , p. 226.
6 Ibid., pp. 121-122.
7 See David Rapaport, “The Study of Kibbutz Education and its
Bearing on the Theory of Development,” American Journal of
Orthopsychiatry , XXVIII (1958), pp. 587-597 and Melford Spiro’s
Children of the Kibbutz (New York: Schocken Books, 1965).
8 Bruno Bettelheim, The Children of the Dream: Communal
Child-Rearing and American Education (New York: Avon Books,
1970), p. 145.
152
9 Ibid., p. 144.
10 Ibid. , pp. 137-147.
1 1 Ibid., p. 281.
12 Ibid. , pp. 188-193.
1 3 Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays (New York:
Dover Publications, Inc., 1969), pp. 214-225.
Chapter VI
1 A study of the influence of this model on the development of
education in the twentieth century can be found in Joel Spring’s
Education and the Rise of the Corporate State (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1972) and in Roots of Crisis (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1973)
by Clarence Karier, Paul Violas and Joel Spring. The effect of this
model on the development of the high school is detailed in Edward
Krug’s The Shaping of the American High School, Volume I (New
York: Harper & Row, 1964).
2 For an introduction to how education has mirrored class
interests see Michael B. Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1970) and Spring, op. cit.
3 The most important government document which provided the
basic arguments for the war on poverty and linked education with
the solution of poverty and discrimination was “The Problem of
Poverty in America,” The Annual Report of the Council of
Economic Advisers (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Printing Office, 1964).
4 On the trivialization of radical school experiments see Jonathan
Kozol’s Free Schools (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972).
5 On the issue of compulsory schooling see The Twelve Year
Sentence edited by William F. Rickenbacker (LaSalle, Illinois: Open
Court, 1974).
6 One position in this regard is clearly stated in John Holt’s
Escape From Childhood (New York: Dutton, 1974).
7 See James Koerner’s Who Controls American Education?
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1968).
8 One recent example of change in this direction is the 1975
yearbook of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum
Development. This yearbook, Schools in Search of Meaning edited
by James Macdonald and Esther Zaret (Washington, D.C.: Associa-
tion for Supervision and Curriculum, 1975), contains a major radical
critique of schooling by a group which has had very strong links with
the public schools.
153
9 The leading advocate of career education is former Com-
missioner of Education Sidney P. Marland. For an example of his
thinking on the subject see his articles “The School’s Role in Career
Development,” Educational Leadership 30, No. 3 (December 1972),
pp. 203-205 and “The Endless Renaissance,” American Education 8,
No. 3 (April 1972), p. 9.
h
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157
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Joel Spring is an associate professor of education at Case
Western Reserve University in Cleveland. He is author of
Education and the Rise of the Corporate State and other
books on education. He has written extensively for various
educational and radical journals. Currently is he working
on a study of national educational policy since World
War II.
Free Life Editions would like to thank the following peo-
ple who helped in various ways to make this book possible:
Renna Draynel, Kathy Brown, Marcia Salo Rizzi, Walter
Heitner and Faculty Press, our friends at Black Rose Books,
and our own staff— Chuck Hamilton, Diane Radycki,
Bertch, and Mark Powelson.
yfcO'A,